With the Microsoft Build conference between the 6th and 8th of May introducing developers to new opportunities in Teams, Spring is an exciting time for Microsoft. The Build event introduced us to exciting new features in Microsoft Edge, compelling case studies, and a vision for intelligent agents that will support the workers of tomorrow.
However, there are plenty of other features that became available in May for Teams users too. Just in case you missed any of the most recent updates, here are the highlights.
Access Proximity-Based Meeting Joining in Teams
Designed to make it easier for employees to find a conference room within seconds, Proximity-based meeting join is now available for Microsoft Teams. This tool tracks down the closest Teams-enabled room in your office that’s available to you use at a moment’s notice.
Once you visit your chosen meeting room, the room display will show your meeting invitation, and you can just accept the alert to bring the entire room into the meeting. Microsoft Teams will automatically enter your meeting in content-only mode, providing audio and video without the issue of noise and echo to worry about.
Proximity Meeting Join is now available for both mobile and desktop versions of Microsoft Teams.
New Features for Calling
There’s nothing worse than getting a call when you’re already busy on the phone. Fortunately, Microsoft is here to help with that, with their new Busy on Busy signal. This feature allows you to let callers know your status when they get in touch. When a call comes to you, and you’re already engaged in a meeting, the calling party will be informed that you’re on another call.
Microsoft Teams also recently introduced the option to manage calls directly from Teams with the new VoIP calls app. If you have VoIP enabled for Teams, then you’ll see the Calls App in your bar of apps for your web and desktop clients. You’ll also be able to turn on voicemail soon too – Microsoft is introducing this after the Calls app is finished rolling out.
Another update to your calling experience is that you can now request other users to call you with the “Call Me” function. To use this feature, all you need to do is provide a phone number. If the call is accepted, your meeting audio switches to a cellular connection. You can add your work and personal numbers to your account and select them automatically.
New Ways to Manage Teams Meetings
Microsoft Teams also introduced a new way to manage the way that you use Teams each day. For instance, you can access your team and add new members to your conferences from the Teams app on your smartphone. You’ll be able to invite guests from outside of your organisation using their email address through your mobile app too. You can also manage members of a group in the app too.
Another upgrade in meeting management functionality comes in the form of “Meeting started” notifications for your phone. If you’ve ever been worried about arriving to a meeting late before, this is the app for you. You’ll receive an alert when a meeting starts, and you can launch the conference directly from the notification. These alerts won’t appear if you’re active on desktop or using “quiet” hours.
Microsoft Teams even allows you to get more information about how people use Teams in the way that suits you. Today, you can export Teams usage reports to .CSV files, so that you can analyse them offline. After you select a report from your Analytics centre, simply click on Export to Excel, then click on the Downloads tab.
Other Updates to Microsoft Teams
If all of those exciting upgrades weren’t enough to get you thrilled about using Microsoft Teams this month, there have also been updates to the educational side of Teams too. For instance, you can share read-only materials with your students to make sure that they don’t leave any notes or annotations on documents that are crucial to their learning.
For first-line workers, multi-team support is also now available to help you access more than one team at a time. This means that you can access your shifts, check out other user shifts, and more within a multi-team environment. This could save you both time and data usage too!
As usual, Microsoft encourages its users to try out the features and provide feedback as to what they think about them using the Microsoft Teams feedback link.
