New Microsoft Teams Features to Come: All You Need to Know

It’s no secret that Microsoft Teams has become THE all-around platform for seamless communication and collaboration within many enterprises. Microsoft Teams is already a popular choice for businesses that use Microsoft 365 products as it is packaged in with the Microsoft 365 suite and syncs up well with other Microsoft technologies.

It’s only logical that Microsoft continues to invest in its flagship platform to provide better communication and collaboration experiences across the globe. And things are getting even better – as Microsoft recently announced there are plenty of new features waiting to be rolled out. Are you keen on learning more? Then just continue reading and be inspired!

As Microsoft put it, the company is aiming on reimagining meetings and workspaces to unlock new forms of collaboration, help people and teams stay connected and engaged, and ensure fluid communication across organizations. So, what does that look like and what can you expect? 

If you are working in teams across the globe you know the difficulty of really getting close and creating an atmosphere of “togetherness”. Bringing people together is one of the key drivers for Microsoft to enable more personal meetings with up to 49 participants on video . The launch of it’s the new “Together mode” will make meeting participants feel closer even if they are working miles apart. This will be possible by placing them in a shared background. So, if you want to share a virtual coffee break with your team, you can easily do so – in a shared coffee shop, using the soon-to-come Together mode scenes. It works automatically as presenters can easily select their preferred scene from the gallery as the default for the whole meeting. Adding to this is a new AI functionality that will automatically scale and center meeting participants in their virtual seats – no matter how close or far they are from the camera.

It was only a couple of months ago when Microsoft began allowing meeting participants to control what they see in Teams. Adding more functionality to Dynamic view, presenters will soon be able to use custom layouts to individually decide how content shows up for participants during the meeting. Imagine a presenter showing a PowerPoint slide and then seeing the presenter’s video feed being added to the foreground of the slide they are showing – just like seeing a moderator in front of his green screen.

Have you ever wished to split groups in a workshop session so they could work on individual projects? That’s no wishful thinking anymore. One of the most requested features on Teams is about to be rolled-out globally: Breakout rooms. You can easily split your participants into smaller groups to leverage brainstorming sessions or boost workgroup discussions. The real gamechanger: Presenters can just hop between each group, make announcements and even close breakout rooms to bring people back to the main session.

New Teams meeting extensions will furthermore allow you to integrate apps and enable custom meeting experiences in Teams. Meeting organizers can access apps from either AppSource or the Teams store and add them as they schedule the meeting.

Much more, Microsoft is also working on centralizing recaps once your meeting is finished. Recaps with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files, and more will automatically get created in Teams and will also be available in your Outlook calendar by going to the meeting placeholder. Looking for a solution to share all of these with external partners? You just have to wait a little bit longer as soon, meeting recordings will automatically be stored—like other files are today—in Microsoft 365 so they can be shared, easily and compliantly, with external participants.

For those of you who found the participant limitations for meetings hard to handle, there is hope out there. If you are using the Advanced Communication Plan, your Teams meeting will soon support up to 1,000 participants with the full meeting experience by the end of the year. For larger meetings and events that require additional control, Teams will soon seamlessly scale to support 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience that includes the ability to use live captions. On top of that, you can also experience better webinar support, such as attendee registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance and view a reporting dashboard after the meeting to help understand attendee engagement.

Are you a telephony enthusiasts? If so, these new phone capacities coming to Teams will definitely create some more excitement! One of the biggest telephony announcements made at Ignite is the launch of Survivable Branch Appliances for Microsoft Teams. These are very valuable appliances as they will allow your telephony to keep working PSTN connection to the Survivable Branch Appliance even if the internet or Microsoft 365 connectivity is down. Also, you will soon be able to transfer calls between desktop and mobile so you can easily move between your favorite devices. Last but not least, Microsoft is going to simplify the calling experience with a streamlined view that shows contacts, voicemail and calling history together, making it easier to initiate or return a call with a single click.

Last but not least, there’s a hot feature for of all us that work in project groups and sometimes need to chase teammates and managers for approval of documents. Can you imagine if this could easily be done in Teams? Just wait for later this month when Approvals will become generally available directly from Teams. Approval flows can start from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app.

Does that all sound exiting to you? Then let’s boost your Future Workplace and see if your workforce is future-proof already. All Ignite announcements can be found here.