Microsoft celebrate the 2nd birthday of Teams with big news

On the 14th of March 2017, Microsoft announced the release of a new product – Microsoft Teams – which introduced a new way to work and collaborate. Now two years on to celebrate the second anniversary of the launch, Microsoft announced some great new features which are on their way.

Since its launch Teams has proven to be the fastest growing business application released by Microsoft and is currently in use at over 500k organisations. 150 organisations have more than 10k active users, and it is used by 91% of the Fortune 100. New features and functionality have been coming thick and fast, and it delivers capability which truly has the potential to transform how teams come together and collaborate.

For me personally I’ve found it incredibly powerful and have seen it change how I work within my own organisation – and it gives me great pleasure to see Teams deliver new ways of working into the organisations that I work with. It provides a focused single pane of glass view into teamwork, bringing everything together in one place and offering deep integration with the wider Microsoft stack. Third-party app developers are also taking the functionality even further by bringing other apps and products into the Teams experience, making it even easier for teams to have everything they need to focus all in the same place.

Here are some of the key highlights of the new features announced by Microsoft this week.

This feature has been on the Microsoft roadmap for quite some time, and has been one of the most in-demand features asked for by our customers. Getting the security right and ensuring that the integrity of the permission for private channels across all the shared products within a Team is likely to have been a very challenging undertaking, so it is fantastic to see this is now being tested internally and will be with us later this year.

Microsoft also announced that they will be delivering a new calendar app into Teams which will bring additional functionality to Teams-users. This will provide additional menu options under the right-click menu for amending meetings, lighting up meetings which are active and the Teams calendar will pull through working hours and out-of-office time from Exchange. 

Meetings, meetings, meetings

“Background blur” was a fantastic feature that was released into general availability a few months ago. This is now being extended to also include a “professional background” option, which will allow meeting participants to select a neutral / alternative background to completely hide whatever is behind them. Additionally new accessibility features will be brought into Teams, with live captioning available to support those who are hard of hearing, or perhaps trying to join meetings from noisy environments such as airports, train stations and so on. New intelligent capture functionality will allow a second camera pointed at a whiteboard to capture and display in-room whiteboarding sessions with external participants in real time, so that they can more easily see and be part of brainstorming sessions while not being physically in the room. Additionally, the Microsoft Whiteboard app will further enhance remote meeting capability, and will allow all participants to contribute to whiteboarding sessions. 

Security & Compliance

Microsoft announced they will implement several security and compliance features for Teams, which will include Data Loss Prevention and the ability to introduce information barriers into organisations, to ensure that there is separation of individuals or groups where information should not be shared. New apps policies will allow organisations to add shortcuts to apps on the navigation bar in the left-hand side of the Teams desktop client, so that end-users can more easily access key apps and information. These can be targeted to groups or the whole organisation. New retention controls for chats and channels have been announced, as well as supervisory and custodian features. 

For the full announcement please read this article over on the Microsoft Teams blog.

I can’t wait to see all these new features and enhancements, and look forward to using them to help my colleagues and customers work and collaborate in new and innovative ways. The future is bright with Microsoft Teams.