Mida

Microsoft Teams Updates - Spring 2021

Microsoft Teams has left its competitors so far behind that it is likely to be soon recognized as the most used collaboration and communications platform worldwide. 

The odds are on its side: in October 2020 Teams had 115 million daily active users and in the latest 6 months this number has increased by 30 million. From the business perspective, CIOs and IT Managers have become aware of this platform’s potentialities, also from the Unified Communications perspective, thanks to the integration with third-parties applications.

Do you know what’s new in Microsoft Teams? Let’s summarize in this article the most interesting updates:

Meetings 

Due to this particular historical period, we are all still forced to avoid in-person meetings and meet colleagues and customers online. Microsoft is working hard to enhance the meeting experience and make it simpler and more appealing. Here’s the meetings news:

• meeting link available directly in the calendar:  inviting people to join a meeting has never been so easy thanks to the meeting link which can be copied and pasted into any conversation;
• automatic meeting recording option: a dedicated notification on the screen automatically warns attendees the meeting is being recorded. This avoids forgetfulness, allowing  you to keep track of all your important meetings and watch them on-demand in the future;
• “Meet now” button: lets you easily create and start an instant meeting directly from your Teams or Outlook calendar;
• Live reactions (e.g. like, love, disappointment) and new intelligent Polls suggestions helps to increase attendees' interactions also from mobile devices;
• Prevent uninvited people: this new additional setting allows to decide which people can join the meeting directly bypassing the lobby and who cannot. You can decide  that some people could join the meeting immediately (e.g. people in your organization) while other participants would have to wait in a virtual lobby before being accepted into the session;
• Recap of meetings: if you miss the meeting or if you were late, a recap of the meeting is now available in the meeting chat tab for all participants to easily catch up on important information. This is useful in a business environment but also in schools and universities to help students studying with recordings, transcriptions, shared files, chats, and so on. Transcription could also be very helpful for people with hearing disabilities;
• “Pick-up slides” option enhances your performance letting you resume the speech from where you left due to an interruption;
• Even if a breakout room has just been opened, now you can reassign participants to the rooms (previously you could only do that when rooms were closed). This is useful for efficiently managing discussions and putting the right participants in each breakout room;
• New attendee microphone settings:  new flexible management of participants' audio allows you to prevent interruptions while you are presenting webinars, or to unmute participants (this was only allowed when their hands were raised).

Calls

Microsoft Teams always try to exceed call experience expectations with additional features to help users handle communications in the simplest and more efficient way:

• Voice-enabled channels can now connect a call queue to a channel in Teams allowing agents to collaborate sharing information with each other while answering the calls in the queue;
• If there is a network outage, the Teams client can now continue to place and receive PSTN calls thanks to a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) without any interruptions. This is very useful to support critical communications.

Additional general features 

There are also other features that soon will be available, that are related to the improvement of collaboration among colleagues: 

• Easier connection between SharePoint and Teams with the possibility to choose to include libraries, pages and lists in your Teams tabs; 
• Simpler file sharing thanks to a dedicated link to each file stored in Teams; 
• Quickly translation of posts on channels and chat;
• Easier set up of your out of office status with automatic replies;
• Easier email sharing from Outlook to Teams;
• Create tasks related to a specific message directly from Teams chat and channels to schedule follow-up actions.

iOS

Microsoft Teams is working to  make available and efficient also from iOS devices these updates:

• Customizable background;
• Meeting controls available in the Mac Touch Bar;
• Safari users can now share outgoing video in web meetings;
• Now iPad users could be chosen as an external presenter in Live Events in Teams.

Keep always under control the Microsoft Teams news on our site to be sure you never miss the latest updates! 

To find out how you can implement a contact center for MS Teams in your infrastructure, please visit the Microsoft Teams’ session on our website or consult the Products pages to discover the advantages of our Teams solutions: C3 Cloud Contact Center, Attendant Console, and Recorder.

by Mida