Microsoft has announced 14 new, groundbreaking features for Teams to streamline collaboration in the WFH world. Together Mode, emojis, whiteboard, live captions with speaker attribution, Cortana integrations and more comes to Teams.
Microsoft has rolled out a series of groundbreaking features, making the platform more competitive to videoconferencing rivals Zoom, Cisco Webex, Meet, Lifesize and others. The Redmond giant has announced a slew of new AI and non-AI features intended to alleviate snags in remote work and learning.
Some of the top features we want to single out are Together mode that cuts down on meeting fatigue and creates a more engaging, inclusive meeting environment by clubbing participants in a single virtual background. There’s Dynamic View that allows users to personalize the view to suit their needs and Cortana integrations extended to mobile version, enabling users to join meetings, send messages and make calls. And here’s the showstopper — Microsoft Teams will support 1,000 participants in a single meeting.
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Let’s take a look at the top features added by Teams added in the latest update:
1. Together Mode: Uses AI segmentation technology to unite meeting participants in one virtual space, as if they were sitting in one common area. The premise is to help users focus on non-verbal communication while eliminating visual background noise and cut down on meeting fatigue. A Microsoft research indicated that ‘the brain exerts less effort when participating in a meeting using Together mode when compared to the grid view.’ Together View will be generally available in August.
2. Dynamic View: Microsoft announced a gallery view for upto 49 participantsOpens a new window in June. The tech major has now given greater personalization controls for on-screen shared content. Users can change how they view and how much they view content and participant images on the screen. Dynamic View will be available later in 2020.
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3. Virtual Breakout Rooms: Allows administrators to split meetings into smaller segments. This is helpful especially in cases where two or more Teams come together to collaborateOpens a new window and want to conduct follow-up sessions. Will be available this fall.
Darrell Webster, Modern Workplace Adoption Lead at Datacom tweeted:
While Together Mode looks cool, I think Breakouts will have more success improving togetherness. Meetings are still limited by audio collisions. Only 1 person can be heard at a time. Mic-time can be monopolised. But Breakouts increase the opportunity to be heard. The shy speak up
— Darrell as a Service 🛎 #RE365 #365MCS (@DarrellaaS) July 8, 2020Opens a new window
4. Cortana for Teams: Microsoft’s voice assistant Cortana will be available on Teams iOS and Android apps in the coming weeks. Users can ask Cortana for tasks like joining a meeting, sending chat messages, sharing files, etc.
5. Video Filters: Helps to modify light and exposure levels to enable clear presentation of a participant’s video feed. This feature is as simple as applying social media filters on images/videos.
6. Live Reactions: Borrowed from social media, this new feature helps participants share thoughts through emojis during a live meeting. These visual elements help communicate without interrupting the ongoing meeting.
7. Chat Bubbles: While live reactions use emojis to communicate, the chat option allows every participant an opportunity to express their point of view. With chat bubbles, users need not keep a chat window open.
8. Speaker attribution and translation for live Captions and transcripts: Besides live captions, already available in Teams, the video conferencing major has added speaker attribution to captions so that everyone knows who is speaking. Live transcripts feature will be added later in the year and the file will be saved automatically in a tab as part of the meeting.
9. Increased meeting participants: One of the most important updates in Teams is an added collaborative support to 1,000 participants and view-only support to 20,000 participants. This will be enabled by the end of 2020.
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10. Whiteboard: A new update for Whiteboard in Teams will finally allow even those users without a touchscreen, to participate in sessions. It also features sticky notes, text and drag & drop. Whiteboard updates are expected by August this year.
11. Suggested Replies: When users receive a message, the assistive AI in Teams generates a contextual message based on the original message. A user can simply tap to reply to the AI-generated text. This will be available in July.
12. Reflect Messaging: This feature can help managers keep track of an employee’s well being with respect to any particular event, project, work-life balance or work in general. It is available as an extension on GitHub which can be setup on Teams by an organization’s IT administrators. Managers can use suggested questions or customize them. The feature can be used anonymously or publicly. Reflect messaging will be available in the coming weeks.
Wrapping Up
With WFH becoming a central way of life, the video conferencing segment has become a battle royale with heavyweights duking it out over meeting participants by baking more AI and analytics into the platforms to one-up rivals. Another top contender are sectors like education and telehealth that have been shaken to the core due to the outbreak. Both, Teams and Zoom have significant presence in these sectors and are on a mission to help companies find their footing with the best-in-breed video conferencing technology.
This series of updates are geared at the education sector and shows how Teams is determined to steal market share from Zoom. Microsoft Teams Together Mode is touted to build a more ‘inclusive, engaging student-centeredOpens a new window hybrid learning environment.’ Some of the new features like Whiteboard, Chat Bubbles, Live Reactions are geared at educators and building more connected learning experiences.
Jeff Brown, Windows Systems Engineer at Rackspace in conversation with Tom Arbuthnot of TomTalks tweetedOpens a new window , “These are nice features but Teams is still missing a usable attendance report and the ability to programmatically retrieve PSTN usage reports.â€
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