New capabilities in the third-anniversary edition of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams turned three last week and released some new cool features for remote workers to be productive and safe in COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak. Using Microsoft Teams, employees can connect seamlessly, regardless of whether they are in an office cubicle or working from home.   

Often such a case occurs when you are forced to work remotely, and it became a challenge to maintain connectivity during professional online meeting experience. With the third anniversary edition, Microsoft Teams is planning to add new capabilities to build the best online meeting experience to help users being more productive from a remote location. Let’s explore some of the new capabilities which already rolled out and some new ones which will be available later this year. 

Avoid background distraction  

While attending Teams meetings from any location, the user with background blur feature can keep the focus on himself without worrying about background movement.  

While attending Teams meetings from any location, the user with background blur feature can keep the focus on himself without worrying about background movement.  

Minimize background noise 

Many of us, while working from home or remote location, face noise issues in the background and are not be able to concentrate on what is being said on online meetings clearly. Microsoft Teams have arrived at a solution with real-time noise suppression features to minimize distracting background noise and to allow us to hear what’s being said, clearly. 

Easy to participate in large meetings  

With new “Raise hands” feature in Teams meetings, making it easier for attendees to participate in large meetings actively. Attendees can send a visual signal when they have something to say, and everyone in the conference will see a visual cue on the attendee’s video feed, as well as in the participant list. This will give an attendee the room to participate in the current conversation. 

Offline Experience  

With offline support, users can now access Teams even when no network is available or with terrible network conditions. With offline capability, users can create and read messages, view calendar, browse previously viewed channels, pinned chats, and many more. 

Low-bandwidth support  

Microsoft Teams is also now optimized to work in a low- or poor-performing network scenarios. With this support, the user will be able to send messages even with sub-optimal connectivity. In case when network bandwidth is too poor to send a message, the user will be notified, and a message will be saved until the user has returned to a functioning network.This feature will come to Teams over the next couple of weeks.

Quickly reach a group of people all at once 

MS Teams allows creating a tag to categorize people based on attributes such as role, project, skill, or location. Tagging people helps the user to notify a group of people all at once by @mentioning a tag in a chat or in any standard channel of the team without having to type every single name. Anyone who has been given that tag will receive a notification as they would if they were personally marked by @.

Automatic creation of an org-wide team 

For small to medium-sized businesses, for org-wide collaboration purposes, O365 global admin can easily create a public group that automatically pulls in every user in the organization and keeps the membership up to date with active directory whenever a user joins or leaves the organization.  

New Files experience in Teams powered by SharePoint 
The new file experience in Teams provides you the ability to have a rich preview across 320+ file types, create views, sync files to your computer, work with metadata, pin files to the top, take actions like check-in and check-out, and much more. 

Store recordings in region storage when Stream isn’t available in Go Local 

Teams meeting recordings get stored in Microsoft Stream cloud storage. In contrast, cloud recordings are currently not allowed/enabled for customers where Stream service is not available in the corresponding Go Local region. Now Microsoft is going to change the current behavior by allowing “Allow cloud recording” and turning it ON by default. This modification will store the recordings in the respective in-region data center. 

Pop-out chat windows for easy chat switching 

For smooth movement between ongoing conversations, now Teams will allow the user to pop out individual chat conversations into a separate window. 

Teams Devices 

Microsoft is planning to expand the Teams devices ecosystem and offer some options specific to verticals, including on-the-spot employees known as “Firstline workers.” Microsoft is adding support for Teams on: 

Include up to 10,000 users in an individual team 

In Microsoft Teams, the upper limit on individual team members has been increased from 5,000 to 10,000 users. This upgrade will start rolling out to customers soon.  

Group chat with up to 250 people 

Sometimes we need to collaborate with a large group – members from multiple teams without creating a team as a group chat. The group chat feature will allow up to 250 users in a group conversation to quickly do a group chat. This upgrade will start rolling out to customers soon. 

Microsoft Teams continues to expand to meet the needs of users in all roles and across industries enabling work continuity during challenging times. Work from home (WFH) is made easier with Microsoft Teams! Teams allow you to quickly connect with teammates and be more productive from home as well.  

Get a consultation from us today to know how quickly you can deploy and adopt technology solutions like Microsoft Teams to make your distributed teams and remote workers more productive.