It should come as no surprise that Microsoft Teams usage almost tripled during the COVID pandemic that struck the world. During this time, many companies were forced to find a way to continue in a socially distanced world. In steps, Microsoft Teams, A Microsoft 365 service included with all Microsoft 365 licenses, and a vastly underutilized service or understood. Over the last year, many of us saw many significant improvements as Microsoft had to accelerate its roadmap of functions and features. Thankfully, there are still more to come and to be excited about!
Mobile Video Backgrounds
While the desktop client has had the ability to change the background experience during video calls, it has been noticeably missing on mobile devices. But thankfully, due to be completed by the end of May, mobile devices will be able to share in the joys of changing video backgrounds.
For the IT administrator
How will this affect your organization?
Users will be able to add backgrounds to their meetings and calls on mobile devices; the feature respects the same policies as desktop backgrounds.
Teams Meetings
What started out as a platform that felt more comfortable in the informal meeting space has recently appreciated some maturity with the new rollout of attendance reports. These reports allow the meeting organizer (now a more critical role in a meeting) to download a CSV file with the details of the meeting & participants.
For the IT administrator
How will this affect your organization?
As an admin, you control whether meeting organizers can download meeting attendance reports by setting a Teams meeting policy. By default, the ability to download the report is turned off. For steps on how to turn on this feature, see Meeting policy settings – Meeting attendance report.
Multi-window Chat
If you haven’t noticed yet, Teams isn’t good at multi-tasking. Thankfully, a new update has been rolling out that allows users to pop out chat conversations into a separate window. Each chat will pop out into a separate window, allowing users to streamline their workflow and easily move between ongoing discussions.
For the IT administrator
How will this affect your organization?
There does not seem to be a direct correlation between the quantity of pop-out chats & local system resource utilization.
Outlook: Share to Teams
Send a copy of email messages or conversations, including attachments, into Teams chats and channels or start a Teams chat related to a specific email message. When sharing to Teams from Outlook on the web, a popup window will appear to confirm to which channel or person you want to share. You can also select whether you wish to include attachments or not.
As of the time of publishing this blog, the features mentioned above may either be already available in your Teams platform or be deployed soon. Sadly, there are only general timeframes released by Microsoft, and they do not yet have a way to ask for new features early.
Have any questions or comments about new features for Teams? Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us and feel free to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter! If you’re interested in more articles about Teams check out our blog on how to share voicemails to show up in Teams:Calls:Voicemail and Top Five Lessons Learned Using Teams .