What’s happening to Microsoft Teams?
For the best part of 10 years, Microsoft Teams has changed the way we chat, collaborate, meet, and share files. Before then it was Skype for Business. Do you remember the days where every chat was a separate window? Where every conversation on Skype for Business was emailed to you afterwards? Microsoft Teams set out to change all of that. And now it looks like it is on the move again.
A new calendar
Teams has a new calendar in Preview! The new calendar looks remarkably like the calendar in New Outlook. The good news is we can finally view someone else’s calendar in Microsoft Teams! As you can see below, this calendar looks familiar…
I do wish my diary looked like the screenshot – nice and clear! But alas – the calendar in Microsoft Teams is tied closer to your organisations’ directory meaning people, locations, and rooms can be added on the left-hand side for comparing each of your calendars. Appointments and meetings in your calendar appear the same way they do in New Outlook including when you click/expand on them. Whilst this feature is still rolling out, have a check in the top right corner of Teams for a toggle switch to enable the new calendar.
Voice and face recognition software
It feels like nearly everyone has seen or tried M365 Copilot in some capacity. To summarise emails or to transcribe and recap a meeting. This presents a common challenge. If I am in a meeting room and we are in-person, we all must join separately on our individual devices for M365 Copilot to understand who is speaking. There is a feature in Microsoft Teams to solve this!
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Within Settings > Recognition, is the answer. While this setting could be managed by your organisation, the recognition controls can help with speaker attribution and Copilot accuracy. This feature can also help reduce background noise. Admins have control over data handling, data retention, and more.
Microsoft does not use any voice or face profiles of users to train any models or any other purpose other than providing the voice and face enrolment feature. For more information, please visit here.
Teams, Chats, Channels…emails?
In public preview, there is a brand-new chat and channels experience coming to Microsoft Teams. Currently in Teams, we have two tabs – Chat and Teams. Going forwards, these will be combined into a single chat tab. Users can customise their view to include @ mentions, chats, channels, favourite contacts and more. In a single view all your communication is happening in one place on Teams, instead of digging through the dozens of Teams site, groups chats, chats, pinned contacts, and pinned chats. There will also be more user preference in how this tab looks and functions, making it fit around the way you like to work. With this refresh and the New Calendar being taken from New Outlook, could we see emails appear in Teams one day?
With new M365 Copilot in Outlook features coming soon such as Organise my Inbox, we are one step away from seeing our most important emails appear in Microsoft Teams. We might see emails appear just like they do in Outlook but in the Teams user interface. However, there could be another way emails come to Teams. Fully embedded within your chats. You could be messaging a person on Teams and within the chat window, reads their latest emails they’ve sent to you and others.
Teams appears to be reinventing itself. While the future looks exciting for Teams, it could be changing the tools we use to collaborate once again, with AI led enhancements to our meetings, and promoting the offline conversation. Have you been using these new features yet? Comment below if you have and if you’re excited for emails in Teams one day!
ERP Implementation Enterprise and Solution Architect Member of Scottish Tech Army AI Performance Coach
2 周I also love the in meeting live language transcript between multiple languages. Have tried this out with various dialects from Scandi and UK and it works really well. Most people unaware it's using machine learning to help with this.
ERP Implementation Enterprise and Solution Architect Member of Scottish Tech Army AI Performance Coach
2 周Bradley Howe I like MSFT office and teams. It's not for everyone. One percieved barrier to adoption isn't the trust or security but perhaps the vast amounts of documentation around how to use it. Also be useful to see on a page perhaps for a specific persona e.g. me as an ERP manager or Enterprise Architect how I can and should use teams. Other tools like genaI assistants work in collaboration but also know there are Premium features which are perhaps better done in Teams like genAI and machine learning meeting assistants? All wrapped up in Azure and secure language models.
Passionate about client service / Strategic problem solver / Extensive experience in the built environment sector / Proactive & inclusive management style / MBA
2 周Nice. I assume the ability to view someone else's calendar is purely intra-company? And regarding voice recognition (required when two or more people attend a teams meeting from a single device) must the recognition facility be set up prior to the meeting, or can it be recognised mid-meeting? All going in the right direction though ??