Awesome features and improvements continue to rollout as well as some great community contributions.
MVP Pat Richard does a video review of the Yealink VC210 Collaboration Bar. These are newer Teams devices for personal or small huddle room spaces.
The free version of Microsoft Teams is now allowing users to create video meetings. This seems like a strategic move to battle with free versions of Zoom.
MVP Andrew Morpeth outlines the new conference mode setting for call queues aimed to transfer calls to your agents more quickly. This is a great service improvement for enterprise voice in Teams.
Kelvin Tegelaar has a great blog post on documenting teams settings using Graph API.
Adam Fowler (@AdamFowler_IT) on Twitter pointed out this week that users can now uploaded their own background images directly from the Teams client. No more navigating to the Uploads folder and copying into that folder.
You can now just add a background you want to #MicrosoftTeams instead of dropping an image file into a folder #MVPBuzz pic.twitter.com/YrhVdCaSNW
— Adam Fowler (@AdamFowler_IT) June 4, 2020
Over at the Microsoft Graph Developer Blog, Jeremy Thake outlines a new Microsoft Teams Meeting Capture solution template for streamlining meeting creation and capturing all the information into a Teams channel for easy retrieval.
Microsoft’s Kevin Martins announced on LinkedIn that 7×7 video layout is coming to Teams for a total of 49 active video feeds in a meeting! This definitely bring Teams up to speed with video capabilities in Zoom and Cisco Webex Teams.
Road Map Updates
Queue Sent Messages when Offline
Teams will queue messages if you are offline and send them once network connection is re-established. If the message is unsent for more than 24 hours, the message will fail. The user will then be prompted to resend or delete it. Expected release is June 2020.
The government cloud is getting several updates, including:
- Increase number of simultaneous video streams in Teams meetings for GCC, GCC High, and DoD. GCC is expected in June 2020 while GCC High and DoD is expected in July 2020.
- Priority notifications for government clouds. Expected release is July 2020.
M365 Admin Center Messages
In a small reversal of the road map update from last week, Microsoft announced that Teams meeting call and meeting chat size will increase only to 300 participants instead of 350 as listed in last week’s road map updates. Rollout is still slated to be complete by the end of June.
Change How Users in Islands Mode Schedule Meetings from Outlook
Skype for Business users who are using Teams in Islands mode currently can schedule meetings either as Skype or Teams meetings. With a new policy rolling out, you can specify that meetings scheduled from Outlook can only take place in Teams. This is great for rolling out Teams and increasing meeting adoption as well as clearing any confusion on where meetings should be scheduled. Rollout for Windows, Outlook on the Web, Outlook for Android, and Outlook for iOS stars in June. Mac is slated for mid-June.
New Information Pane and Pinned Posts
Teams will have a “Channel info” pane that will show summary information related to the channel including description, list of recent contributors and members, and system messages. There is also the option to pin any channel message to this channel information pane for all members of the channel to see. Each of these updates correspond with Road Map ID 64173 and Road Map ID 64334. Rollout will start in July 2020.
Suggest Replies in Teams Mobile
Need to quickly respond to a message in the mobile client? Suggested replies gives users three response options to choose from to quickly reply to other people. You’ve probably seen this in other platforms, including LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft. Users will have the option in the mobile client to disable this if they want. This corresponds with Road Map ID 63671. Rollout will start in July 2020.
Removing some Teams Channel System Messages
System messages, such as who has been added or removed from a team, will no longer be posted to the Channel page. These messages will still be included in compliance logs. For commercial tenants, this is starting to roll out in mid-June and completed in mid-July.
