Microsoft is launching a capability to create "offline" meetings in Teams.
The feature will allow users to create a calendar invite within Teams for events such as personal appointments, in-person meetings and lunch break slots that will register users as offline without having to be in a scheduled video meeting, similar to an "offline" feature already present in Outlook.
Users can schedule an offline meeting as they would a traditional one, but there will be an additional "online" toggle that users can turn off when creating calendar events. A meeting with its "online" toggle turned off will not automatically create an online meeting link, chat thread or any other "Teams online meeting artefacts", as the roadmap said.
Microsoft's 365 roadmap describes the feature:
Create a meeting in Teams and turn off the online toggle when setting up calendar events for personal appointments, lunch break slots and more."
The offline meetings feature is now generally available for desktop and Mac users.
A Busy Roadmap of Teams Features
Microsoft constantly adds innovations to Teams — from game-changers like the AI-powered productivity tool Copilot to less significant but welcome quality-of-life improvements like an intuitive new Files app.
Among other features Teams has introduced in recent months are capabilities to enable users to express themselves more during meetings. Last week, Microsoft announced it was refreshing Teams' virtual backgrounds library with new animated versions to allow users greater scope for showing their individuality. A new series of still images were added to the Teams collection and will be followed by animated versions in June.
Last month, Microsoft added Snapchat Lenses to Teams to allow meeting participants to express themselves creatively mid-call. Microsoft partnered with Snap to utilise Snap's Camera Kit SDK capabilities, allowing Microsoft to integrate 26 Snapchat AR Lenses into Teams without requiring a separate add-on.
Microsoft also announced a raft of meeting-centric quality-of-life improvements last month in a Teams April update. New features include automatically lowering a user's hand after speaking and green screen integration. Echo detection and automatic muting of nearby Teams devices that create an audio feedback loop were introduced, while Closed Captions were enabled for embedded videos in PowerPoint Live for Teams.
A more niche solution was a Teams Payments app intending to help small and medium businesses (SMBs), in partnership with Stripe, PayPal and GoDaddy, to support Teams Payments with commerce features.
Furthermore, the Teams Premium licence announced this year will introduce a new variety of AI-powered features. These include Intelligent Recap of missed meetings, Live Translation of meeting dialogue, and conference templates that admins can create to have the correct settings automatically.
