Every day, Microsoft are working on ways to improve the user experience for the millions of remote workers using Teams around the world. Microsoft Teams has just released another set of useful productivity features, here we explain how these new features can enhance your working day.
Here are the details of the latest Microsoft Teams features:
Spotlight the presenter video during Teams meetings:
During larger Teams meetings with multiple presenters, it can be hard for participants to stay engaged. Microsoft has just released the Spotlight feature where the meeting presenter can select a specific participants video to be shown as the ‘main feed’ or their own video which will then be pinned on all your participants’ screens to help keep them engaged. Participants can also select to Spotlight a specific video themselves.
Whilst in a Teams meeting, Select Show Participants. Under Participants, right-click on your name or the one you wish to feature and select Spotlight.
Right-click again and select Stop Spotlighting to exit.
Teams Company Cards enable you to access employee contact details and recent activity whilst on the go:
Easily find out which team or department your colleagues come from with the help of the new company cards. Easily accessed by the mobile app under the ‘Organisation’ tab found by clicking the 3 dots. Search for anyone in your organisation and it will clearly display all their contact details plus show you who is their line manager and department head. This is really useful for new employees of companies working remotely as users can find out exactly who does what with a click of a button and also view their recent activity within Teams without having to search through channels.
Speaker Attribution for Live Captions:
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to inclusion, you can now turn on live subtitles direct from the participants of a Teams meeting, these subtitles will be shown for whoever is speaking. This is beneficial for people who are hard of hearing or if you have participants likely to be taking notes.
To turn on live captions during a video conference, go to your meeting controls and click More options … > Turn on live captions.
Prevent Unmuting during large Teams meetings:
You can now have up to 350 Teams meeting participants within an online Teams meeting. Large meetings can be hard to manage and can cause discussion crashes where multiple people talk at the same time or talk over each other. Presenters of Teams meetings (the person who setup the meeting itself) now have the ability to prevent people from unmuting themselves without raising their hand to do so. This is a great feature for Teams for Education users or larger companies where multiple departments are in the same meeting.
Pinned Posts within a Teams:
Teams channels can become overloaded with posts and links to files, especially large ones. Trying to retrieve specific posts using the search function can take time. Team members can now pin important posts by clicking on the three dots and selecting ‘pin’. If you then click the information icon at the top you will be shown a list of all the pinned posts for that channel.
Teams Whiteboard Read-Only Mode:
Whiteboards are a useful feature that can be set up within Teams meetings to boost collaboration as all participants can add to them. However, there are certain scenarios where it is useful to show your whiteboard notes in read-only mode, where only you the presenter can make edits. This new whiteboard read-only mode enables you to present and explain your notes and then grant access for the other call participants to make changes making brainstorms more productive. This is also a great feature for Teams for Education customers when performing online learning via virtual classrooms.
New File Sharing Experience:
Previous to now, you could only share a live link to a file within a Team that was stored within that Teams specific files. The new file sharing experience makes file-sharing a whole lot easier there is now an option to share a link for any file that is stored in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive.
Schedule Meetings on The Go:
You can now schedule online Teams meetings from your mobile using the iOS and Android Microsoft Teams app and we have also read that it will soon be possible to schedule channel meetings to the team within a specific Teams channel directly from your mobile.
Infinity Group are a Microsoft Gold Partner across seven core competencies with specialist knowledge of Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in finding out more about Microsoft Teams or how to use the latest Microsoft Teams features, please get in touch.
