Microsoft Teams latest, missed and future updates

Where is Microsoft Teams now? What updates are still in the progress status “working on it”? And last but not least what updates should we expect soon? This is exactly what I cover up in this post!

Where is Microsoft Teams now? The first Q1 of 2020 brought new capabilities for Microsoft Teams revealed in News from Build 2020. The closer the way out of Skype for Business might be, the more new capabilities and features we see in MS Teams. Microsoft is bringing these to improve Teams. Here are all the cool new updates of Microsoft Teams from the end user perspective.

A lot has happened over the past few months. MS Teams has experienced massive growth due to the coronavirus pandemic situation, with more than 75 Mio active users (rising from 44 million in March to 75 million in April 2020). 

In this post I do cover three parts:

• Latest NEW updates in MS Teams
• What's NOT in MS Teams yet
• What MS Teams features could we expect SOON?

Anyway, let's have a look at the most important new updates in Q1 2020 first.

Join by dialing to skip the meeting lobby

Allow attendees who join by dialing to skip the meeting halls. Allow callers to join a Teams meeting immediately without having to wait in the lobby. This eliminates the need to stop in the middle of a meeting to allow attendees to enter. To set this, select Meeting Options and Do you want to always allow callers to skip the hall? Set the switch to Yes.

Notify when a caller joins a meeting

Meeting organizers have the ability to announce that callers have joined or disconnected from a Teams meeting now. You always know who is attending your online meeting. You can set this by configuring the Meeting Options and toggling the toggle button next to Notify me when a caller connects or disconnects.

Improved meeting join webpage

Microsort in somehow cleaned up the meeting join page and it is much better user experience for now. When you click the link through from the invitation you received you get three options how to join Teams meeting:

1. join the Teams meeting through web app, you join with the browser. All the features are accessible through the web now. If you're running Chrome or chromium edge it's a fully fledged experience audio-video desktop sharing.
2. without any plugins you can launch the the actual full Team's client and when you launch the Teams client it downloads and pushes you into the meeting

If you use Teams all day every day it's probably better to have the full-fat client. There are some minor abilities in the client that aren't available in the web experience but for joining a meeting for someone who doesn't have a team account it's perfectly valid to use the web.

3x3 video view

Microsoft increased the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings. One of the most highly requested and anticipated features. Finally! Like in Zoom we have 3x3 video view (for Win or Mac users) now. That means the increased number of participants who can be viewed in a MS Teams meeting (the number increased from 4 to 9) is nine.

Raise your hand!

Do You have a question or comment, but don't want to interrupt a colleague who is currently speaking? With the new hand-raising feature in Teams, you can let others know you want to say something. During a meeting, you can select Raise Hand on the control panel or raise your hand directly from the participant list. This will display a gold hand icon next to your video channel to alert other participants that you would like to contribute to the discussion. The presenter may decide to let you speak or to put your hand down if necessary.

Download the participant list

The organizers can now find out about attendance during the meeting. To get an attendance report you reach the View Attendees. In the upper right corner will you see the Download Attendee List icon. The report is downloaded as a CVS file that can be opened in Excel. The file will contain the names of the meeting participants and their connection and departure or rejoin times. The list can be downloaded just during the actual meeting not after.

Real-time noise suppression

This mini new feature makes sense. Small thing but this keeps you more focused during your meetings. Everyone knows typing on their keyboard could be loudly, or if someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

Pop out chats into a separate window

Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and move more easily between ongoing conversations.

Custom Backgrounds

Keep the focus on you — not what’s behind you! We are building upon the heavily popular video background blur feature in Teams meetings with background effects and background templates. 

This new feature in Teams allows meetings attendees to customize their video background from a list of pre-selected images or toggle on blurring. This feature is generally available. Microsoft will continue to iterate and enhance this new feature to include the ability for users to upload their own custom images. This is already unofficial possible. 

Background Blurring for iOS

The iOS users have the option now toggle on blurring to keep the focus not on what’s behind. This frequently utilized feature was just brought for desktop users to your iPhones and iPads.

The Yammer app for Microsoft Teams available

The Yammer app for Microsoft Teams is now available “No more toggling between apps or confusion about where to chat” as Microsoft promotes this. The new Yammer App for Microsoft Teams brings a fully interactive Yammer experience into the hub for teamwork, helping you stay connected to what’s happening across your organization, and engage and connect with your communities directly within Microsoft Teams. You may simply add and pin the Yammer app to the left navigation rail and start using Yammer from there (discovering communities, knowledge, and conversations right alongside your projects, chat, and meetings). Learn more about Yammer in Teams here.

Acknowledge exceptional efforts and mindset

Praising using these badges today is cool in Teams already. Not just despite challenging times and situations, people across organizations are going above and beyond to help our communities. To show appreciation of your team's members efforts, Microsoft has released three new badges (courage, optimism and inclusive) in Praise, to show those who are truly making a difference. 

Channel cross-post editing

Sometimes it is necessary to spread the message to most of your team members, right? You can not just post across multiple channels but edit these posts now. Channel cross posting now supports editing a message after it has been posted. Additionally, you can add or remove channels to reach a wider audience or have a focused conversation.

Live captions in iOS and Android

Whether hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location, live captions allows meeting participants to follow along and read what is said during Teams meetings. Live captions is now available on iOS and Android mobile devices just in English.

Microsoft 365 Live Event Limit Increases

Microsoft 365 live events will temporarily raise default limits until July 1, 2020 for live events hosted in Teams, Stream, and Yammer. The following increases will begin rolling out next week:

• Attendee limit: events can support up to 20,000 attendees
• Concurrent events: 50 events can be hosted simultaneously across a tenant
• Event duration: event length has been increased to 16 hours per broadcast

Share system audio in Teams live events

With share system audio in live events, your attendees will hear the audio of the content that you are sharing on your screen. This feature works just like share system audio in Teams meetings, and is great for sharing audio and video experiences with your attendees. This feature is only available for presenter and producers in a live event joining from the Windows desktop Teams client. So if you have in your organisation live events disabled, sorry.

End the meeting for all participants

Finally here. Meeting organizers are now able to end the meeting with a push of a button. Within the meeting control bar, only meeting organizers will see an item that says "end meeting.” All participants exit the meeting when the organizer selects this button. A great example of a relevant scenario is in education or in trainings: in some situations, class meetings/trainings should not continue after class is over without teacher/trainer supervision.

1:1 Call Recording

Now you can easily record your 1:1 calls in Teams just as you already can for meetings. Simply select the option to record and call participants will be notified on their screen that a recording has begun! You can't make multiple recordings of the same meeting at the same time. If one person starts recording a meeting, that recording will be stored on the cloud and available to all participants.

Teams calendar 

By right-clicking an item in the calendar, you can view the options for the reply request, start a chat with the meeting participants, or quickly join the meeting when it starts. You can even cancel the meeting with the right click. Microsoft has also improved event planning forms. 

Teams meetings for remote learning (Teams for Education)

Despite school closures, educators can still connect with and support students by using Microsoft Teams meetings for class sessions, office hours, and more. Here is the latest guidance on how to maximize learning and keep students safe in Teams meetings. You can set up a Microsoft Teams meeting for your online classroom directly from within Canvas, Blackboard, Schoology, and other LMSs. There is guidance for this. Try to keep students safe in Teams meetings with these helpful guidelines.

Live events for A1 faculty licenses (Teams for Education)

Saving for Education. Microsoft Teams live events host capabilities will be available to education users with a Microsoft Office 365 A1 faculty license, at no extra cost. That means users with A1 faculty licenses, which is free to accredited educational institutions, can host and broadcast live events. Live events will be automatically enabled for users with an A1 faculty license and automatically disabled on July 1, 2020. 

What's NOT in Microsoft Teams yet

Let's have a look through the top requests from UserVoice, all of which have thousands of votes, and some of which are over three years old.

• Show video for all people in a video meeting - New - 9 is a good start but not what was actually requested.
• Multiple accounts - Working on it- Over 3 years old, "working on it" for almost exactly 3 years.
• Multi-window for chats and more - In testing - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since August 2018, rolling out since... yesterday. No mention on this blog. No sharing of what this will look like.
• Move a channel - On the backlog - Over 3 years old, "working on it" but then withdrawn.
• Include Office365 calendar - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since July 2018.
• Compact mode - Under review - Over 3 years old, was "working on it" for most of that time, now rolled backwards to "under review", still no indication that you understand what is actually being requested. Now that more people are collaborating on real work from home using single small laptop screens, the enormous Teams UI is a burden. A mechanism for working on another program while chatting about it in a *small* window is now higher priority than ever.
• Reply to specific message in chat - New - No response yet, but needs to avoid the specific UI mistakes that make threading in channels such a nightmare.
• Archive channels - On the Backlog - Over 3 years old, was "working on it" for 15 months, now on backlog.
• List users in channel - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since April 2017.
• Move conversations - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since October 2018.
• Custom emojis - On the backlog - Was "working on it" for a year, now demoted to the backlog.

Also, now that more of our work is coming in online, a proper fine-grained set of notification options is a higher priority than ever. That's been open for three years too.

What new MS Teams features could we expect soon?

Create teams quickly with customizable templates.

When creating a new team, you’ll soon be able to pick from a variety of customizable templates. This is for now available in limited manner in Teams for education, where you already find templates for teams. 

You choose from common business scenarios, like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates, like a hospital ward or bank branch. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, apps, and guidance. Admins will also be able to create new custom templates and templatize existing teams in their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months and appear automatically.

Easily create and manage chatbots in Teams

Integrating with Teams is also easier than ever: Just select the bot you want to use and then click Add to Teams. For additional convenience, Power Virtual Agents now supports single sign-on (SSO), so users will no longer have to reauthenticate when using Teams for the first time.

Share Power BI reports in Teams

This could be big. Power BI users can be able to share reports, or specific charts in reports, to Teams with the new Share to Teams button. Senders can also direct the recipient’s attention to a specific chart in a report or share to an entire team. To get started, select Send to Teams from the Power BI portal and type in the team name you’d like to share with.

Schedule virtual appointments via Bookings in Teams

Organizations will now be able to schedule, manage, and conduct business-to-consumer virtual appointments through the new Bookings app integration in Microsoft Teams. With a single scheduling experience, you can manage multiple departments or locations and securely host everything from candidate interviews and student office hours to financial consultations and medical visits. 

Broadcast events and create studio productions from a virtual stage in Teams

With so many organizations working remotely, and travel at a record low, how do you recreate the magic of an in-person presentation or interview for an all-remote audience? Microsoft is introducing the new Network Device Interface (NDI) support and Skype TX interoperability for Teams. It offers a more advanced set of production options for both public and private, customized, high-scale broadcasts.

Extend the Shifts app in Teams

New capabilities in the Shifts app extends functionality and enables integration with existing systems. First, the Graph APIs for Shifts are now generally available, so can you integrate them with any other external workforce management tool, including custom workforce management systems. Plus, new Power Automate actions enable developers to take information from Shifts and create customized workflows with other apps or perform operations at scale. Finally, new triggers and templates will help support a variety of timesaving and process-optimization scenarios, like enabling auto-approvals for shift requests in scenarios where a manager’s approval is not needed.

Collaborate with Fluid components and workspaces in Outlook and Office.com

The Fluid Framework is on a journey to make work more adaptable and focused. The first Fluid Framework integrations in Microsoft 365, coming to Outlook and Office.com, will enable you to collaborate on dynamic content and create connected components that can be shared simultaneously and seamlessly across apps. Tables, charts, and task lists can be easily inserted in Outlook for the web, so your sales numbers, project tasks, and research reports are always up to date. Within Office.com, Fluid workspaces can be created and managed, including within your document activity feed, Recommended list, and @mentions—or search for them across Office.com. And, because Fluid Framework components are lightweight, edits are instantaneous, empowering work to be fast and flexible. These experiences will be available to those with a Microsoft 365 enterprise license in the next few months.

I am looking forward to see more in Teams!

What about You?

Share Your thoughts in comments bellow.