Microsoft has announced a big update coming to Teams. The newly announced features are aimed to achieve three things; reduce meeting fatigue, make meetings more inclusive and engaging, and, lastly, help in streamlining work.
One of the noticeable announcements is the ability to support up to 1,000 participants. All of these people can actively take part in the meeting by being able to chat. But if you want to accommodate even more participants Teams allows up to 20,000 people at once. Albeit, the additional participants will only view the meeting and not take part in it actively.
Microsoft Teams is also getting Chat bubbles. With Chat bubbles, chats sent during a Teams meeting will surface on the screens of all meeting participants, ditching the need to manually open a chat window to view the chat screen.
Live reactions is yet another feature aimed at helping meetings to become lively by adding a simple way to display non-verbal cues without physically doing it. The feature is borrowed from PowerPoint Live Presentations and the company reiterates they’re bringing PowerPoint Live Presentations to Teams in the future.
Together mode is also new, primarily aimed at helping reduce fatigue among participants by digitally placing them in a shared background so they feel as if they’re together.
Besides together mode meant to make you feel like you’re in a physical meeting at the office, dynamic view improves on the traditional video meetings aspect. Dynamic view uses AI to control how you see shared content and other participants in a meeting.
If you haven’t found a killer background yet for video calls on Teams, video filters might sound more appealing. Video filters on Teams let you adjust various video qualities like lighting levels and camera focus to customize your appearance before jumping in a meeting.
For Microsoft Teams admins, you will soon be able to know how your team feels about a particular topic by creating a poll-like experience using the Reflect messaging extension. The polls can also be made anonymous so workers respond freely.
Microsoft also announced speaker attribution to captions, updates to Microsoft Whiteboard, integration of the Tasks app and Cortana to Teams, suggested replies, and Microsoft Teams display, an “all-in-one dedicated Teams devices that feature an ambient touchscreen and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana.”
