The past few months were quite eventful for Microsoft as it introduced a series of updates.
Though most of you know what Microsoft Teams is, here is a small overview for the newbies.
According to Microsoft, Teams is a chat-based workspace available with Office 365. Microsoft Teams is actually a robust and all-encompassing tool for sharing and collaboration, allowing staff from different locations to work together as a single functional unit. The hallmarks of Microsoft Teams are easy access, security, privacy and stability. You can use it to
- schedule and track meetings through Outlook
- collaborate across multiple offices and divisions
- conduct video conferences
- edit, share and find content across organisation through OneDrive, OneNote and SharePoint.
Let us go through the latest features introduced for Microsoft Teams now.
Video Calls are More Engaging through Together Mode
Microsoft aims to make video calls not just significantly more engaging, but less fatigue-generating too!
So, how the video calls are made more engaging?
Teams will place all participants of the video call in a shared background. This will help the participants to feel as if they are sitting in the same room.
Together Mode, brought in by the AI segmentation technology allows users to focus on body language as well as faces of other users, making it easier to understand non-verbal cues.
Together Mode is perfect for meetings where multiple people speak, brainstorm or have roundtable discussions as it is easy for the participants to understand who is speaking.
Gallery View
Microsoft Teams has announced to expand the current gallery view from nine to 49 in video calls. With the gallery view, Teams introduces parity with Zoom, a popular application for video conferences. Microsoft has also announced that it finally plans to support as many as 20,000 participants in Teams meetings.
Performance Improvement
Offline support is enabled in Microsoft Teams so that the users can write messages offline in instances of limited network connectivity. These messages will be sent automatically as soon as internet connectivity is established. It is possible to run desktop client on macOS and Windows in environments with limited bandwidth or even no internet connectivity. Microsoft points out it has boosted desktop launch time on macOS and Windows making changes to video rendering. Microsoft is also optimising battery life for Teams iOS users to help the Firstline Workers and people who remain away from their desktop for a significant part of the day.
Reverse Number Lookup Enhancement
When you receive calls in Microsoft Teams, Reverse Number Lookup will show the display name instead of the phone number. With this feature, the system can convert the number calling you to the name configured in Outlook or Azure Active Directory.
This will help users to identify the caller and the name of the caller will also show up in call history, voicemail and activity feeds.
Safe Transfer
Safe Transfer allows to transfer a call between Skype for Business and Teams with confidence. If the recipient does not receive the call, it will ring back you.
You must be a Teams user and the recipient should also be a Teams or a Skype for Business user in the same or a federated tenant.
The above discusses only some of the latest features introduced by Microsoft Teams. For regular updates, check out https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de.
