Last month saw lots of product releases, improvements, and newsworthy moments within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.
Microsoft Teams announced updates relating to chat and collaboration, meetings, Mesh in Teams, webinars, town halls, Teams Rooms and devices, Teams Phone, Teams platform, and frontline worker solutions.
Some of the standout Teams news from the last month includes Mattermost’s extended Teams and Microsoft 365 offering, Disney’s decision to opt for Teams over Slack, and Surrey Country Council adding Teams telephony to its upgraded comms infrastructure.
Chat and Collaboration
The ‘General’ channel can now be renamed to something clearer and more relevant, making it simpler for channel members to locate essential information. The new name will appear in alphabetical order within the teams and channels list.
Team owners can recommend specific channels to member through an updated teams and channels onboarding flow.
To streamline the file and link sharing process, Teams has incorporated a ‘Shared’ tab in 1:1 and group chat conversations as a replacement to the ‘Files’ tab. The ‘filter by keyword’ option will also make it easier to find the content you are looking for.
Teams desktop and web applications have updated image sharing in chat and channels to display pated images in the message compose box beside other images to use up less space. When images have been shared in Teams it will automatically resize it, taking into account the image’s size and aspect ratio.
Meetings and Mesh
Copilot in Teams can review meeting transcripts and meeting chats to offer users an overview of discussions. This feature is being made generally available this month on desktop and mobile.
Expanded controls have been added to help manage the availability of Copilot in Teams meetings. IT admins will now be able to turn Copilot ‘Off’ per tenant, per user, or both, via the Teams Admin Center. Meeting organisers will also be able to access these controls in meeting options, in which they will have a choice to ‘Allow Copilot’ during meetings, during and after meetings, or simply turn it off.
Users will be able to access meeting summaries via the meeting event in calendar for Microsoft Outlook. Summaries include links to the recap page, recording, transcript, notes, shared files, meeting details, and whiteboards. Intelligent meeting recap is available for Teams Premium and Copilot for Microsoft 365 license holders.
Interpreters can show which language they are translating into with one click, enabling a single interpreter to perform bi-directional translation services.
Microsoft Mesh has launched a new workshop environment, which has a presentation area and four breakout rooms for group discussions, ideal for small team collaborations.
Webinars and Town Halls
Presenters can now moderate Q&A sessions, as well as publish questions for meeting or event participants to view.
A new update to the webinar and town hall experience allows attendees to vote for questions to be put to presenters and for organisers to sort question based on votes, filter them by keyword, and archive them.
Webinars are now available for government community clouds (GCC), with registration support for up to 1,000 attendees.
Teams Rooms and Devices
The meeting experience in the Team Rooms on Windows app (version 5.2) is gaining new features in two release phases, some last month and the rest this month.
Ultrasound proximity join allows users to locate and add Teams rooms to your meeting. Ultrasonic signals sent out by Teams rooms can be detected by your device to help build a list of nearby rooms on the pre-join screen.
When you join a meeting through proximity join with a mobile or laptop from Teams Room on Windows, Teams will display that you are in the room alongside the other in-room participants.
IT admins can change the text size and other user interface elements on the front-of-room display and touch boards.
The room video tile are now capable of automatically adjusting sizes to fit the screen depending on how many people are in the room. Admins can disable the feature if they wish.
OEM camera features can be directly controlled in Teams Rooms on Windows, which includes group framing, OEM specific IntelliFrame views on in-room devices, and active speaker framing.
If Cloud IntelliFrame has been enabled in a room, the preview video displays an IntelliFrame icon to show in-room participants how they appear to others. This is available for Teams Room Pro subscribers.
Breakout room support enables Teams Rooms on Windows to be incorporated into breakout rooms and switched in and out of the main room.
Your work location will automatically be updated to ‘In the office’ when you connect into peripherals at a bookable desk, making it easier for co-workers to know your availability.
Admins can now add custom background images on Teams panels through the Teams Admin Center, providing you have the necessary Teams Rooms license.
Teams panels will automatically restart on a daily basis like Teams rooms, but the default time can be changed, or the capability turned off altogether.
New Teams-certified devices include the ViewSonic TeamJoin TRS10, Meeting Owl 3, Yealink MeetingBar A40, VC520 Pro3, Poly Studio E60, and the Lenovo Wireless VoIP headset.
Teams Phone and Platform
‘Do not disturb’ settings will be applied to incoming calls received to Teams Phone mobiles. Previously they were only applied to calls in the Teams app.
Teams phone device updates include call park and retrieve feature upgrades for improved handling and an enhanced experience for non-touch phones.
The AI-powered tool CapCut Speech is now available in the Teams app store, allowing users read text aloud, create custom voices, and edit and translate audio. Edited speech can then be shared to Teams.
Frontline Worker Solutions
Access to Teams in Shared Devices Mode (SDM), which is the gateway to critical tools like Via Engage, Shifts, and Power BI, has been made simplified for frontline worker.
September also saw UC Today’s Rob Scott host a discussion relating to the latest updates and features in the Teams ecosystem, alongside Tom Arbuthnot from Empowering Cloud and a panel of Microsoft Teams experts.
