New innovations in Microsoft Teams enhance collaboration and business processes for all workers
Today at Ignite, we are announcing a ton of new capabilities in Teams to help customers in all industries work in new ways and better respond to the evolving needs of their business.
- Customize your Teams conversations and experience
- Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams
- Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings
- Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams
- Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries
- New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data
- Automate workflows, integrate custom apps and data insights within Teams using Power Platform
1. Customize your Teams conversations and experience
Private channels enable users to create channels within existing teams that can be viewed and accessed by only select members of that team. Users can create a private channel by selecting "Private" under the privacy settings of the new channel. Private channels are available starting this week and you can learn more here.
Multiwindow capability provides users the option to pop out chats, meetings, calls or documents into separate windows to help you streamline their workflow. Multiwindow capabilities will start rolling out early next year.
Teams client for Linux will support the main Teams capabilities like chats, meetings, calling as expected so people who use Linux client at work or educational institution can collaborate with others on Teams. Users will be able to install native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats. Teams client for Linux will start rolling out as a preview later this year.
New messaging extensions including Polls and Surveys will be available in Teams chat and channel conversations. Click on "…" at the bottom of the message compose box in a chat or channel to access these extensions and solicit instant feedback on shared items or questions. These will start rolling out later this year.
Pinned Channels allows users to keep important channels at the top of your teams list for easy access. This capability will be available later this year.
2. Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams
New integration between Outlook and Teams makes it easy to collaborate no matter where the conversation is taking place. The user can move an email conversation from Outlook, including attachments, into a Teams chat or channel conversation by clicking on the ‘’Share to Teams’’ in Outlook. They can also share a conversation from Teams to an Outlook email by clicking on the more options (‘’…’’) icon in a conversation. This will start rolling out early next year.
Tasks in Teams gives you a new unified view of your personal and assigned tasks within Teams. It consolidates your tasks across Microsoft To Do, Teams channels, Planner and Outlook. Users have smart views including tasks assigned to you, the priority as well as start or due date. Users can choose the view that works the best for them – list, boards, charts, schedules – to get things done. It will be available to users early next year.
The new Yammer app for Teams makes Yammer communities, conversations, and live events accessible right within Teams. IT admins and end users can also pin the app on the left navigation rail in Teams to have easy access to Yammer - helping everyone stay up to date with their communities and participate in organization-wide conversations. It will start rolling out early next year.
3. Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings
Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available in Teams Meetings via the share tray. This gives teams an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to ideate and collaborate whether they are in the same room or working remotely.
Live Captions in Teams Meetings makes meetings more inclusive, giving participants another way to follow along with the conversation, and addressing the needs of participants with different hearing abilities or language proficiencies. It will start rolling out as Preview in US English later this year with plans to expand to other languages in the future.
New presenter and attendee controls allow meeting organizers to pre-define presenter and attendee roles for meeting participants. Designated presenters will have full control over the meeting, whereas participants in “attendee” role won’t have ability to share content, take control, mute or remove other participants, admit people waiting in the lobby, or start/stop recordings. It will be available later this year.
Together with Citrix, we are optimizing the performance of Microsoft Teams Calling and Meetings for Citrix virtual environments allowing organizations to deliver a high-fidelity Microsoft Teams experience for an on-premises or Azure hosted virtual desktop or application. We expect this solution will become generally available to customers within the next 30 days.
Expanding the Cloud Video Interop (CVI) partnerships to include Cisco the newest partner to help customers use Teams meetings with Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices in the meeting rooms, starting in early CY 2020.
With support from industry vendors, Microsoft has pioneered a new approach that enables Microsoft Teams Rooms devices to connect to meeting services from other vendors via browser-based technologies. Microsoft is working with Cisco and Zoom to enable a direct guest join capability from the respective video conferencing devices to the video meeting service using the web app. This capability will be supported on a new generation of meeting room devices with embedded web technology. We plan to add support for other vendors over the course of time. These solutions are expected to be generally available in early 2020.
Collaboration bars for Microsoft Teams are a new category of devices from our partners to convert small spaces into online meeting and collaboration spaces. These affordable, simple to install and easy to manage video conferencing solutions attach to your displays, TVs or touchscreens in minutes for high-quality video meetings. It enables experiences like one-touch & proximity join, content sharing and whiteboarding.
Poly with their Studio X Series and Yealink with VC210 are first two partners to launch their devices in early 2020.
New Microsoft Teams speakerphones have a dedicated Teams button which gives users the ability to have a seamless interaction with Teams. The first speakerphone to be certified is available from Yealink CP900 today, which will soon be followed by additional speakerphones built for Teams from our other peripheral partners. Additionally, we are offering 20% off all phones and peripherals which are certified for Teams during Microsoft Ignite. To take advantage, just add the promo code MSIGNITE19 at checkout on office.com/teamsdevices between November 4th, 2019 to November 15th, 2019
New enterprise Phone System capabilities, such as emergency calling, call queue functionality, administrative control, Phone System for Government customers like GCC High and DoD, as well as advanced functionalities like music on hold, call delegation and voice mail management will be available by end of this year. Additionally, we also announced new ISV partner enterprise voice advancements like Contact Center and Compliance Recording that make Teams Phone System a great cloud phone system solution for enterprise customers. You can find more information in the Teams Calling blog.
4. Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams
SMS Sign-In gives Firstline Workers a low friction way to sign into Teams with their phone number and a one-time SMS passcode for authentication. It will be available as a public preview early next year.
Off shift access is a new setting that can be enabled by IT administrators to provide a notification to Firstline Workers when they access the Teams app on their personal device outside payable hours. The users then need to provide consent to the notification before being able to access their app. It will start rolling out early next year.
Global Sign-Out saves time and keeps Firstline Workers secure when they use shared devices at work by enabling them to sign-out at once from all the apps they use on their shift. This feature will initially be available as a public preview for Android devices early next year and in preview for iOS devices thereafter.
Delegated User Management enables Firstline managers to manage user credentials and approve password reset requests via the My Staff portal. As a result, Firstline managers are empowered to unblock staff issues, reducing the burden of identity management on IT. It will be available as a public preview early next year.
Graph API enhancements provide two-way communication between a workforce management system of your choosing and Shifts to enable enterprise-scale configuration. And with new open source integration templates on GitHub, customers can integrate Teams with Kronos and JDA. JDA connectors are available now and Kronos coming later this month.
5. Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries
Virtual Consults offers a simple way to schedule and conduct B2C virtual consultations via Microsoft Teams, such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Attendees can easily join the virtual consultation via their web browser or Teams mobile app. Teams has enabled virtual consults through its new external appointments functionality and is now in private preview.
Patient Coordination in Teams enables healthcare professionals to streamline patient care. By entering patient information into Teams’ secure platform, physicians, nurses, and other care team members can centralize and digitize the information they need when communicating and collaborating around patients in various scenarios like patient rounding, multi-disciplinary team meetings, and discharge huddles. Patient Coordination in Teams supports enterprise-grade security and enables HIPAA compliance. It will be available in public preview soon.
6. New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data
Advisor for Teams assists IT admins in planning a successful Teams deployment for their organization, offering recommended plans and a collaboration space for the deployment team to streamline the roll out of all the Teams workloads, including messaging, meetings and calling workloads. This feature is currently in public preview.
Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Business & Office 365 ProPlus semi-annual channel will streamline your Teams deployment with Office ProPlus. Starting on January 14th, 2020, Click-to-Run will install the Teams client for all PCs on the semi-annual channel, and the client will update itself regularly from that point onward. This will be a gradual rollout over several weeks, so not all existing installations will immediately get Teams added when Office is updated.
Policy packages make it easier to assign policies and ensure your users have access to the Teams capabilities they need. IT Admins can assign a policy package, a collection of predefined policies and policy settings, to users who have similar roles in the organization. The first set of policies packages are available now and are designed for roles in the education space. We will continue to release more policy packages soon. Learn more here.
Policy assignment to security groups in PowerShell is also going to be available by end of this year.
Microsoft Teams Rooms in the Teams Admin Portal will allow the IT admins to manage the device inventory for your organization and do tasks such as assign configurations, restart devices, monitor and diagnose. This will start rolling out later this year.
Managed Meeting Rooms is a new Microsoft offer for managing meeting rooms as a service. This cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service ensures that Teams meeting rooms are secured, up to date, and proactively monitored for a great in-room experience. To date, we've been working with more than 100 customers to manage more than 1,500 meeting rooms. The private preview will open this experience to more of you! If you’re interested in participating in the private preview, you can register your interest here.
Safe Links in Microsoft Teams, powered by Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, now safeguards Teams messages from harmful links in real time. When a web address (URL) is shared in a private chat or channel conversation, Teams will perform a time-of-click verification of web addresses and alert users of any risk such as malware or viruses.
Other security and compliance capabilities that will be available by end of this year include support for messaging events such as deletion and edit within audit log search; the extension of information barriers policies to apply to files stored in a team’s SharePoint site; support for retention policies as short as one day within Teams retention policies; and the expansion of e-Discovery results to now include search results for keywords and the conversations around them.
7. Automate workflows, integrate custom apps and data insights within Teams using Power Platform
Power Apps creators can now publish their apps as Teams apps for easy use and access when working on Teams. Admins can also publish these custom apps directly to their company’s app library in Teams, making them more discoverable to users. New updates also improve the experience of adding these apps to Teams. It will start rolling out later this year.
Pinning an app created with Power Apps to Teams left rail will provide users easy access to frequently used apps in everyday use. It will be available to users later this year.
Teams-centric actions & triggers with Power Automate allows users to create new kinds of automated workflows within Teams. The user can create a trigger for specific actions when someone new joins their team, notifications within Teams when a certain keyword is mentioned, automatically set focused time and to save notes to OneNote. These will be available to users later this year.
Power BI interactive cards in Teams chat experience will help users quickly find and take actions on their data. It will start rolling out early next year.
We are committed to delivering rich and engaging experiences that help our customers like L’Oreal, Telstra, Special Olympics, St. Lukes and Berkshire to transform their work culture and business processes with Teams.
Get guidance and tools to help you with the adoption of Teams at our Microsoft Adoption hub. Thank you for helping shape Teams through your feedback in our UserVoice forum. We are always listening and welcome your comments.
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