With 115 million daily active users to appease, Microsoft Teams can’t afford to slow down. The Microsoft group has been rolling out new and enhance features at incredible speed lately, offering everything from a new hard mute option, to an ARM64 native solution.
There’s so much to keep track of in the last month, that you may well have missed some important updates to your favourite team collaboration app. That’s why we’re covering everything that’s new for Microsoft Teams this November.
Updates to Meeting and Calling
Alongside the new hard mute feature, Microsoft rolled out a variety of features for meeting and calling this month. The new Live Captions feature with speaker attribution means that you can see who was talking along with what they said when transcribing meetings. There’s also the option to spotlight an individual and ensure that all attendees focus on a specific speaker during a meeting. Once pinned, the video will be the main feed that all participants see.
New advanced production options for broadcasts with Network Device Interface support allows event producers to change each participant’s video into a discrete source to use in the streaming production tool you choose. This means that you can bring speakers together in customised views or Together mode. Microsoft also introduced a new “read-only” mode for Microsoft Whiteboard, when you need to collaborate by presenting a whiteboard without allowing edits.
Meeting and call recordings for Teams are now available to store in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, so you can share information and manage recordings faster. You can choose your policies in PowerShell. Microsoft also announced changes in IP video policy to provide admins with more control over how users manage video in Teams meetings. Current policies are only available to prevent outgoing video, but the Allow IP video policy prevents outgoing and incoming video when necessary.
Microsoft Teams Device Updates
Alongside the ARM64 update recently, Microsoft rolled out new capabilities for Microsoft Teams Rooms, these include spotlight support for your meeting rooms, so you can place the focus on a single presenter. Hard mute will also be available in Microsoft Teams Rooms going forward.
Tech leaders, Dell introduced a new meeting space solution for remote and onsite collaboration recently, featuring a full group ecosystem that includes the new OptiPlex 7080 Micro offering meetings on Windows. There’s also support for running Logitech Tap and ConferenceCams. One-touch join, and proximity detection makes starting meetings easy.
EPOS announced two new headsets for Microsoft Teams too, the IMPACT MB Pro 1 UC and 2 UC ML are now certified for Teams. Users can enjoy high-end audio quality for optimal comfort, enhanced call handling, and natural, rich sound. All the while, intelligent and reliable technologies remove unwanted noise.
The Latest in Microsoft Teams Chat and Collaboration
For your chat and collaboration experiences, Microsoft rolled out a new offline presence status to let users know when you’re not available in Teams. There’s also a language-aware proofing solution that will spellcheck your messages in your language of choice.
New templates make creating a new team as simple as possible. The custom templates include crisis response, event management, and industry-specific templates like bank branch or hospital ward. There are various first-party templates to choose from, and you can also create custom options as an IT professional to standardise team structures.
An updated file-sharing experience means you can work on a single source of truth within Teams, creating shareable links for any file stored in Teams. Users can apply appropriate permissions and assign them to files in OneDrive and SharePoint too. The updated SharePoint pages app will allow you to consolidate and share content in context, using documents, twitter feeds, links, and more. You can also add pages as tabs in teams.
Enhanced global notification settings will allow users to configure their notification settings through a new settings section. This ensures that you can track the activity that matters most to you. Go to your profile picture, Settings and Notifications to make a change.
