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, webinars and town halls, Teams Phone, Teams Rooms and devices, IT admin and security, and frontline workers.
Some of the big Teams news from the last month has been the impending end of support for Teams Classic, 8x8 launched Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams, and Teams has introduced Call Record Insights to provide a way of extracting useful insights from call data.
Teams Chat and Collaboration
A new Copilot capability in chats and channels, ‘multi-turn conversations,’ allows you to ask Copilot for more details or clarification as a follow-up to your initial question. For example, you could ask Copilot to expand on one of the points from a chat summary.
The general team channel can be hidden or shown just as you can with other channels. As a result, you can minimise channel list clutter and remove distractions from the most important channel.
Group chat members can now upload an image or select an illustration or emoji as their group chat profile picture, which helps users distinguish between chats more easily.
Files can be attached to a chat based on context by simply selecting “Attach file” from the message compose box. Teams will then show you the five most relevant files from OneDrive and SharePoint based on your chat conversation to choose from.
The new default experience when creating a team will be to start from scratch. If you would prefer to use a template, you can simply select one from the template library.
Because not all channels need to be associated with a team, it is now possible to create a channel from the same menu you use to create new teams.
Teams users can also now sign in with multiple accounts across clouds, including government accounts, and get real-time notifications for all these accounts. This feature was previously announced last year alongside a host of new Teams features for multi-tenant organisations.
Teams Meetings
Teams calendar notifications can be managed from the Teams activity feed without taking you out of the flow of work. Notifications for meeting invites, cancellations, changes, and forwards will now be shown in the meeting organiser’s activity feed.
IT admins can manage how people in their organisation use Copilot for meetings and events, choosing whether Copilot is available during and after meetings.
Teams Webinars and Town Halls
Meeting organisers can select up to six languages to support live translated captions in town hall events, which town hall attendees will then be able to choose from. Teams Premium license holders will have ten language options.
A red dot will appear beside the Q&A icon to reflect when a new question or reply has been added.
Teams Phone
Voice isolation has been added to make calls clearer by using AI to remove background noise. With access to the voice profiles of meeting participants, the new technology can filter out the background noises from typical settings like noisy cafes, crowded airports, and more.
Teams Phone Mobile users can have a single phone number for both their Teams and mobile.
Call delegates and delegators can view shared call history records for the shared line, allowing for greater transparency and collaboration.
Call forwarding settings can be managed directly from a phone device's home screen, which includes common area phones. Admins can decide whether to show call forwarding options on the home screen for personal and common area phones.
Busy on busy settings can be configured with preferences set to determine how calls are routed when you are busy or engaged in another call.
An incoming call notification can redirect incoming calls to voicemail, in addition to the traditional options of accepting and declining the call.
Teams phone devices can now make calls from the phone number assigned to an auto attendant or call queue.
