In only four years of existence, Microsoft Teams has amassed a staggering 115 million DAUs – a record high for the UC industry. It owes this success, at least in part, to the widespread shift to WFH last year. Tom Arbuthnot, MVP, and UC Solutions Architect, traced how Teams usage has grown over the years. Between July 2019 and March 2020, the number of Teams users increased by a modest 19 million. But between May and October of 2020 (a period of five months), Teams usage spiked by 40 million. To bolster this growth and carry on its incredible growth momentum, Microsoft has constantly invested in WFH features for Teams. Granted that as a chat and calling platform, Teams was always built for remote work and WFH at some level. Even for on-premise implementations, Teams served to connect distributed workers from around the world working together on a single project or catering to a shared group of customers. Now, in the last few months, Microsoft has taken this a step further by introducing value-added features specifically for WFH users. Indeed, on the occasion of last year’s Ignite Conference, we reported how Microsoft has announced a slew of new offerings meant for this very use case. Since then, nearly every feature and update Microsoft announced has been mindful of the requirements of the WFH employee – given that it is poised to be the new normal for the foreseeable future, and several of us might even switch to remote permanently. Here are ten features that are sure to come in handy for WFH scenarios in 2021 and beyond.
Together Mode for video calls
Introduced in the latter half of last year, Together Mode enables a naturalised setting for video calls. A fallout of protracted WFH is the continued absence of in-person connections, which is exactly what this feature seeks to address. Instead of a typical 7x7 grid, you see a gallery, a theatre, a coffee shop, or a bunch of other backgrounds as the setting for your video call. Teams uses artificial intelligence (AI) to render participants’ video streams on this background and recreate our facial expressions with remarkable accuracy. The intention is to make it feel like participants are sharing the same physical space.
PowerPoint Live for smarter remote presentations
Introduced in March of this year, PowerPoint Live is mint-fresh and takes on the challenge of conducting presentations without a live audience. While you could share your screen, a typical remote presentation doesn’t allow you to react to audience expressions, anticipate their needs, and alter your pace accordingly. PowerPoint Live corrects this by arranging your slides side-by-side with meeting participants. Co-presenters can seamlessly exchange control, and attendees can interact with the content via emoji reactions, hyperlinks, and videos (entirely self-paced).
Wellbeing insights for employees and managers
In September of 2020, Microsoft brought the power of its existing workplace analytics tools into Teams through wellbeing and productivity insights. When working from home, you don’t have the usual checks and balances of a 9-to-5 office, and peer wellbeing habits, making it easy to disrupt your work-life balance. This feature gives you personal insights as well as the ability to set “protected time” – for a much-needed scheduled break. The manager-facing feature is even more game-changing, as it provides concrete data on collaboration, overtime, and burnout risk, which gets significantly harder when you cannot see your team in person.
Configurable presence states to control availability
Like most collaboration platforms, Teams reflects user presence in real-time, letting co-workers know if you are available, busy, or away. But did you know that Teams goes one step further to give you optimal control over availability, scheduled presence, and collaboration hours? You can manually set your present state as “Appear Offline” and configure a pre-specified duration, during which time you might want to engage in solo work, research, individual brainstorming, or simply take a breather. With the incredible flexibility of WFH, comes the expectation of always-on availability – configurable and scheduled states can address this.
Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams
This is one of Microsoft’s pre-pandemic Teams updates that makes a massive difference to how you collaborate with your remote colleagues. Microsoft Whiteboard is a separate app that’s available as part of Microsoft 365, and the company introduced a Teams integration in 2019. You can simply visit your Microsoft 365 Admin Centre to turn the whiteboard app on, and everyone in your organisation will be able to create freehand sketches during meetings, make annotations, write notes, etc. You can save your whiteboard data on Azure, just like you would have a persistent, physical whiteboard in a typical office space.
