What’s New in Microsoft Teams | May 2019
Published May 31 2019 08:00 AM 58.4K Views
Microsoft

 

In addition to the announcements that you may have seen from Build Conference, several other features became available this past month of May in Teams!  

Find a nearby meeting room easily with proximity-based meeting join in Teams 

 

You know that frantic feeling when you need to find an available conference room at the last minute to take a meeting? Those days are over! Proximity-based meeting join for Microsoft Teams Rooms is now available. This means that the Teams app on your desktop or mobile phone will find a Teams-enabled room for you to use that is nearby and available.  

 

Once inside your chosen meeting room, the front of the room display and console will show your meeting invitation. Simply accept the incoming invitation on the console to bring the room into the meeting. 

 

Microsoft Teams will automatically join the meeting in content-only mode from your desktop, allowing the room to provide audio and video into the meeting without echo and feedback generated by the other devices in the room.   

 

This functionality is now available for your desktop and mobile clients, and will start working automatically. 

 

Learn more about Microsoft Teams Rooms at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftTeamsRooms 

 

1.png

 

On your PC the pre-join screen of your meeting will highlight that a Teams Room is nearby.  

 

2.jpg

 

Front of Room display and console showing meeting invitation. 

 

 

Let callers know when you are already on the phone with Busy on Busy signal 

Can I call you back? Busy on Busy is a feature that allows callers to know a user's status when contacting them. When a call comes into a user who is already engaged in a call or meeting, this setting alerts the calling party that the user is on another call by playing a busy signal. This feature is automatically available in your Teams experience.  

 

Make calls directly from Teams with the new Calls App

 

Users that have Voice over IP (VOIP) enabled will now see the Calls App in the App bar in the Desktop and Web Clients. Additionally, we will be turning on voicemail for these users after we complete roll out of the calls app. There is no change in functionality for existing users or their calling policy configuration. 

 

 

Share read-only materials with your students in the new Class Materials folder

 

Want to share files with your students but don’t want their creative edits on the material? Use the new Class Materials folder in the General channel of Microsoft Teams for Education.This is a great way to share documents or reference materials like syllabi, school rules, and reference materials with the class. This ‘Class Materials’ folder is read-only by default. Learn more here. 

 

3.png

 

 

Multi-team support for Firstline workers who are on more than one team 

 

Many Firstline Workers work on more than one team, and now with multi-team support in Shifts, employees will be able to access their shifts, other user's shifts, requests, open shifts, their profile, other user's profiles in a multi-team manner. This feature will save them both time and potentially data usage if they are switching teams often. 

 

4.png

 

 Image shows a user accessing their schedule from the Contoso East, Contoso West, and Contoso North teams.  

 

You already live on your phone, so now manage Teams on your phone 

 

Manage your team and add new members straight from the Teams app on your phone. Invite guests from outside your organization via their email address using your mobile app (). In the Teams list, tap the “…” next to the team name > “Manage members” > Add person icon on the top right and enter their email address to invite them to the team.  

guest1.jpg

 

 

Always be on time for your meetings with “Meeting started” notifications on your phone

 

You’ll be the most punctual member of the team now that you will receive “meeting started” notifications on your phone when someone joins a Teams meeting on your calendar. You can join the meeting right from the notification, and skip searching for the correct meeting in your calendar.  As with any notification, it will not appear if you are active on desktop or during quiet hours.  

 

6.png

 

 

Join meetings the way that works for you with “Call me”

 

Have the meeting call YOU! You can now join meetings through a “Call me” functionality both from pre-join screen and during the meeting. To use this feature, you need to provide a phone number where you can receive a phone call. If the call is accepted, your meeting audio will switch to the cellular connection. Your personal and work phone numbers, if added to your account, will be available for selection automatically.  

 

7.png

 

Work with your Teams usage reports the way you want by exporting them from the Teams admin center 

 

You can now export Teams usage reports to CSV files for offline analysis. After selecting a report in the Analytics and reports section of the Microsoft Teams admin centerclick Export to Excel, and then on the Downloads tab, click Download to download the report when it's ready. 

 

8.png

 

 

Let us know what you think! 

 

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive (we really do!) to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs. 

 

— Marissa Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Teams 

 

 

43 Comments
Iron Contributor

Will there ever been a 'Call me' feature on the PC or Web client?  Trying to use Teams for meeting with externally facing customers can be pretty brutal because everybody is used to meeting tools which present the call me option right when you join along with computer audio.  In Teams, it's super buried.

Copper Contributor

The Added call app is nice, but it looks like the only way to make a call to a random number is to first create a speed dial for that person?  Is there a way to just leap to a number pad for those times you just need to dial out?

@JustinDynamicD if you have a Phone system and dial plan on your account, you can dial with a keypad without creating speed dials. It appears in bottom left. 

What happened to Calendar app and Per channel notifications, both were supposed to roll out already and they kind of went MIA? 

Brass Contributor
@Marissa Salazar Some cool features, I like the speed at which MS brings new features to Teams! One thing that I'd LOVE to see is Wallboard for call queues, even a basic one that shows users in the queue, average wait time, amount of agents online etc. This one keeps coming all the time and currently there's no solution apart from 3rd party presence based systems (which don't all that work well).
Silver Contributor

I'm surprised there is not a single comment about private channels status :)

Brass Contributor

@wroot Real quick, what's the latest on private channels? ;)

Brass Contributor

Heart

Iron Contributor

But no callerID yet for enterprise voice Smiley Mad

Brass Contributor

@Christopher Neuendorf 

 

If one-click is buried we're all toast.

maybemaybe

Sure do wish that March 2019 rollout for the new calendar app was a thing in essentially June 2019 though.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=48516

Copper Contributor

Our company will be going into full production on Teams as soon as people can hear their phones ring. We need that secondary ringer. Please.

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to restrict users to view/edit/access a particular channel, or channels, within a Team?

Silver Contributor
Copper Contributor

This is good but it's not the most sought-after feature users are waiting for.

 

Please work moving channels between teams. Almost 8000 users have been begging to MS for years. 

Copper Contributor

We really need the ability to make a Channel private - especially when dealing with a Team that has guests.  It's a no brainer to me.  Presently we have to create a second Team just for the internal group.  Seems a waste of time to me.

 

Secondly, is it possible to 'hide' all of the 'admin' changes we make to a team as most of them are irrelevant to the rest of the team.  Would be great to move those to an Admin tab or not show them in the main Team.

 

Lastly, would be great to have a Tab on the General Channel, preferably before 'Conversations' which allows the Team Owners to pin messages for the team.  Currently I have to create a Wiki in order to write up a 'Welcome' message for the group, or guidelines or other pieces.  It doesn't stand out and doesn't give any logic to the structure of the team. 

Iron Contributor

@Melmix I second your point about the secondary ringer, it is the only thing holding us back from a full roll-out of calling to replace our IP-PBX.


Copper Contributor

i've seen the private channels preview, it looks great! cant wait for it to rollout

 

 

Microsoft

@bcarleton @Nerida Secure Private channels are coming later this year! See the Enterprise Connect feature round up post for more details. 

Silver Contributor

"later this year" was what people heard last yer, it is not enough anymore.

Brass Contributor

Hi,

 

We face some customers using Appear.IN website to create meetings due to easiest to invite external people and others features.

 

>>> Is there some comparison chart?

 

We have a customer using Google Apps + Facebook Workplace + Appear.IN and we would like to offer entire MS Office 365 platform.

Copper Contributor

while the updates are good, Microsoft needs to focus on basic functionality that is still missing. examples: want to "share" (get a task link) a planner task from mobile? no sir, that is only available from desktop. huh?? why remove it from mobile where is much more useful? has been on uservoice for months and its its trivial to implement.

another: when tasks change you get a useless popup saying "tasks changed" and a "pretend link" that does nothing when clicked. ok great, so show me WHAT changed like trello and all other similar apps do.

Copper Contributor

while the updates are good, Microsoft needs to focus on basic functionality that is still missing. examples: want to "share" (get a task link) a planner task from mobile? no sir, that is only available from desktop. huh?? why remove it from mobile where is much more useful? has been on userv for months and its its trivial to implement.

another: when tasks change you get a useless popup saying "tasks changed" and a "pretend link" that does nothing when clicked. ok great, so show me WHAT changed like trello and all other similar apps do.

Copper Contributor

Will Archiving Channels feature be available soon? Thank you. 

Copper Contributor

My Team has a Channel that we talk on all day everyday but unless someone @ mentions a person, we do not get alerted with sound notifications for every new message that arrives into this Channel chat. We all have our Settings/Notification sounds on All, and we are Following the Channel, but we only get a banner to notify us that a new message arrived. Another person in our organization that does get sound alerts for every kind of new message in a Channel, and I, compared all possible settings in MS Teams, in the computers volume and computer in general ... all settings are the same as each other. Any other idea on how to the the Channel chat sound alerts to work for every new message? 

Microsoft

@Ilya Bukshteyn  Hi Ilya! Thanks for the great support in this community!  One question, I saw a few months ago you replied to a post regarding automatic password rotation and that it's able to be enabled via XML. I tried looking here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/room-systems/xml-config-file but I couldn't find the XML element name in order to enable it.

 

I highly appreciate your support with this request.

 

Best regards!

Microsoft

@gubrac auto password rotation is still in early / TAP / pre-release rings. @Sohail Tariq will publish documentation once this is released, hopefully soon.

@Ewini please start a new thread for your issue. 

Copper Contributor

@Chris Webb  I don't know how to start a new thread on this site  :(  sorry 

Silver Contributor

Go to Communities menu, then Teams, then maybe some sub category or post right away.

Copper Contributor

We are desperate for Microsoft to include tracking time off balances within Shifts. It is something which many people asked for in Staffhub but still we are yet to see any progress on this.


Also the flows available to StaffHub need to be updates to work with Shifts. No point rolling out shifts if it has less functionality than Staffhub/flow.

Copper Contributor

We really need the secondary ringer feature to be added for us to make the full transition from Skype to Teams.

Microsoft
@darren73 we are working on secondary ringer in this next (q3 cy19) quarter.
Copper Contributor

Thank you.

Iron Contributor

@Ilya Bukshteyn great to hear about secondary ringer, our users have been pestering us for that so will go down well when it is introduced.

 

On upcoming features, do you have an update slide deck (think the original was released early last year) with key areas of Teams and columns with features coming soon and those planned going forward?

 

Many thanks!

Copper Contributor

@Ilya Bukshteyn On your roadmap it says secondary ringer this month. Why the delay? Any chance our company can beta test

Microsoft

@Melmix I miss spoke we had this as a work item in Q2 so should be done shortly but features go through our release rings based on quality and feedback so can't say for sure when it will be GA.  You can join our TAP program for Teams to see features before GA.

Iron Contributor

@Melmix  @Ilya Bukshteyn  Have just noticed that the release date has changed to Q4 19 on the roadmap :(

Copper Contributor

@Ben Dodson Indeed. I have contacted our MS Manager and asked for preview access. We can't wait that long.

Brass Contributor
@Casper Frank-Stender @Ben Dodson Our org needs this as well. Any traction with gaining early access?
Iron Contributor

@Melmix @phake  We are desperate for it, we can't move the org over to Teams calling as our pilot group highlighted this as a substantial issue that resulted in missed calls.

Copper Contributor

@Ben Dodson @phake I'm waiting to hear back. The senior service delivery manager said that he has forwarded my request to their "Microsofts Teams responsible". 

Copper Contributor

I'd really like to see the Wiki improve. I'm using it as a primary communications tool for my team and there are some obvious omissions, such as being able to drag and drop a file onto a page just like Confluence. Also, it's not possible to set an inline link across pages because there no linking facility besides going to the target and then copying the link. 

 

PS, please make the Pages list and the Teams list panels be resizable!

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to "deactivate" or password protect the "Teams Room is nearby" function

 

One of our rooms is used only for private staff members so if someone is "nearby" can activate the room and interrup the meetings.

Co-Authors
Version history
Last update:
‎Aug 24 2022 05:32 PM
Updated by: