Microsoft is adding new management tools to the Teams Admin Center, including shared calling for Teams Phone.
Announced at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event, shared calling simplifies Teams Phone deployment, enabling admins to empower groups of users to make and receive public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls through a shared phone number and calling plan.
Microsoft described the feature:
With shared calling, a single phone number and calling plan can be shared across a team of users whether that’s a team of 10 people in a small office or 10,000 users in an enterprise department.”
Admins must require a Teams Phone license via either Microsoft 365 E5 or Teams Phone Standard, and this feature is generally available.
What Other New Management Features Have Been Added to Teams?
Other significant new features being introduced to the Teams Admin Center are low-friction Teams Rooms deployment options and advanced collaboration tools.
Teams Rooms can now be deployed using Windows Autopilot, currently in private preview. This minimises deployment times from days to hours. For devices that can’t utilise Autopilot, Microsoft is starting a more streamlined deployment option with one-time passwords (OTPs) and 16-digit codes that remove the risk of sharing access credentials. OTPs will be generally available this month.
Remote Access will be introduced to the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. It will allow remote troubleshooting and proactive maintenance, monitoring device health and impeding problems before they can affect meetings.
Advanced Collaboration Tools will be a feature exclusive to Teams Premium to empower IT admins to offer a safer and more self-regulated environment. Priority account chat controls, currently in preview, allow users to manage unwanted internal communications through policies settings. Users are notified about chats started by new contacts, allowing them to accept or block the discussions.
Advanced collaboration analytics, now generally available, provide insights into external collaboration behaviours. This allows Teams admins to prompt successful collaboration and mitigate the potential risks of external collaboration.
What Else Has Been Announced at Ignite 2023?
Microsoft is combining to-dos, tasks, projects and plans into Planner for one unified collaborative experience.
The tech giant is merging Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project for the web into a single product. The Planner app in Microsoft Teams will be updated with these new features in the spring of 2024, with web functionality planned to be introduced later in 2024.
Among several new updates being added to Microsoft 365 for frontline workers is Copilot’s availability for subscribers to the F3 license.
Copilot will be added to the F3 license starting in December and will be available for no extra cost. The product will also include commercial data protection, allowing frontline workers to make intelligent requests. Examples include looking up inventory or summarising large internal documents without being worried about sharing sensitive business data.
Other updates to Microsoft 365 for frontline workers include the Shifts plugin for Copilot, dynamic features for managing frontline teams, and being able to deploy Shifts at scale.
Microsoft is rebranding Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise as part of Copilot to simplify the user experience. The move intends to make Copilot more accessible for everyone to leverage the tech giant’s premier AI-powered productivity tool via Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
For subscribers of Microsoft Entra, Copilot in Bing, Edge, and Windows also introduces commercial data protection. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) will be out of preview and become generally available starting December 1.
