What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2019
Published Nov 04 2019 06:00 AM 464K Views
Microsoft

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.

  1. Customize your Teams conversations and experience
  2. Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams
  3. Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings
  4. Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams
  5. Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries
  6. New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data
  7. 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.  

 
Users will also get actionable missed activity emails which make it easy to stay on top of missed conversation in Teams. The missed activity emails show the latest replies from the conversation, and allow you to respond directly from within Outlook.
 

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.

YammerAppInTeams.gif

 

 

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.

Whiteboard animation.gif

 

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.

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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.

MicrosoftTeams-image.png

 

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.

 
Learn more about Microsoft Teams devices here.

 

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.

SMS Sign In - TEAMS.gif

 

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.

Off shift demo gif (final).gif

 

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.

global sign out gif.gif

 

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.

VC pics both1.png

 

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.

AdvisorForTeams.gif

 

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. 

 

New app catalog helps IT admins get the information they need to confidently enable apps from the Microsoft Teams admin center. The catalog provides administrators details such as name, description, certification status, publisher, and policy details for applications available in their Teams environment. The certification status within the catalog covers a 2-tiered program – Publisher self-attestation and a rigorous Microsoft 365 Certification. These programs ensure admins have full visibility into app’s security and compliance practices. This will start rolling out by end of this year.

App Catalog.JPG

 

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.

MTR Management crop.gif

 

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.

 

145 Comments
Iron Contributor

Awesome news! I love Microsoft Teams Rooms in the Teams Admin

Microsoft

Love it. Awesome update. 

Brass Contributor

Pop out chat is one of the most useful and practical day to day feature enhancements I think, can't wait for this one to be available.

 

Nice work.

Steel Contributor

Impressing news

Fan of the Meeting Room Management

integration with Zoom and Cisco

Integration of the Whiteboard

Integration of tasks coming from Planner, To Do, Outlook (worth doing some clean-up in here no?)

 

Cheers

Copper Contributor

Updates like this are going to continue to drive the success of Microsoft Teams, it's a bit of a shame so many are "coming soon" 

I know a lot of our clients are anxious for Private Channels. 

I'm looking forward to integrating Tasks into Teams. 

Copper Contributor

Thanks for sharing Karan , some great updates, SMS Sign In for Firstline workers (assuming this is Kazala).

Copper Contributor

Awesome work! I can't await to introduce these great new features to our costumers!

Brass Contributor

Sheesh, this is a serious pack of awesome updates - well done Teams team! Can't wait to try them out!

Copper Contributor

Amazing news and love the organized layout of the post. Can't wait for some of these to be made available (especially direct guest)

 

 
Copper Contributor

How will private Teams integrate w/ SharePoint? Will the libraries for each Team also be private within the SharePoint Team site?

Copper Contributor

Microsoft working hard on making Teams the best collaboration tool for businesses. Keep up the great work!

Copper Contributor

Link to more information on private channels is not allowing access. 

Copper Contributor

love the powerPlatform integration stuff...

 

but I don't *love* hearing about fancy features when the basic chat functionality is bad. Give us Compact Mode. Give us the ability to disable multi-threaded chat. Give users the ability export a chat log. Let users completely customize the UI.

Steel Contributor

Will the webex and zoom web based interop be available on Surface Hub as well?

 

MTR zoom webex.PNG

Steel Contributor

The Private Channel link above resolves to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/private-channels and that just gives a 404.

Brass Contributor

Love all the new stuff but please don’t forget some essential missing features, some of which have been waiting on uservoice for 3 years:

fulltext search for wiki (4158 votes)

group calendar in teams (11818 votes)

move channels into other teams (10440 votes)

rename channel sharepoint folder (4743 votes)

 

Iron Contributor

Does Multiwindow capability extend to having different organizations in different app windows? I'd like to be able to launch these separately as one does with browser profiles.

Brass Contributor

Is this going to be made available to GCC?

Brass Contributor

Happy to hear about Private channels.

Copper Contributor

We are waiting function "Read" for Message receiver in Microsoft Team , I see your roadmap five months ago . :facepalm:

Brass Contributor

I liked the whole Video Interop Support for cisco and zoom! Good move Microsoft :happyface:

Brass Contributor

Wow this is so awesome!!

Brass Contributor

@Louter365 

 

Upvoted, no search in Wiki is pretty much an own goal when competing with SLACK.

 

"Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge (except WiKi)

 

Hmm, SLACKEW...

 

 

Brass Contributor

Wow! More updates then expected! Great! Keep going Teams!

Copper Contributor

super update ! I'm looking forward to it.

Copper Contributor

Very impressed. I can't wait

Brass Contributor
Are Private Channels the end of transparency and work out loud? Should "going private" need some form of moderation or approval?
Steel Contributor

You have the option to disable creation of private channels.

Brass Contributor
Is that at the Team level? So ALLOWPRIVATECHANNELS is off by default when created and a TEAM OWNER request form to go private would work.
Silver Contributor

@Karan Nigam, looking forward to these new features.  Also interested if Zoom and Webex will be available for the Hub.  While I promote Teams meetings, we do deal with some outsiders who use these other meeting apps.

Iron Contributor

Sure it's a long one. Hopefully see those features in action soon. While reading these features, I got an idea to classify the new features in terms of how it can be useful interns of both end-users and administrators.

https://blog.admindroid.com/ignite-update-whats-new-in-microsoft-teams-for-the-end-users-and-adminis...

Copper Contributor

and nothing yet to copy all?

Copper Contributor

Delighted with these updates. Private channels will be a game changer in terms of halting the creating of unnecessary new Teams. Pop outs are a little thing that will solve a big gripe. Keep up the good work! 

Copper Contributor

Amazing!

 

Can't wait to use all the new updates. Waiting for a long time for the pop out chat and others to help bring the rest of the company to use Teams. 

 

Keep it up. 

 

 

Silver Contributor

So, it seems you can create private channels, but not to convert into one or back to public. Well, this kind of expected assuming all the background technical trickery with O365 groups and sites and so on. But i predict high voted cries on UserVoice "Let us convert channels!!!" in the near future :)

Brass Contributor

Christmas in November!!!!  Can't wait until they add Group Calander

Copper Contributor

Amazing!!!

Copper Contributor

Stellar announcement from Microsoft Teams in Ignite :stareyes:

Iron Contributor

Has any work been done on fundamentals like international sufficiency e.g. having Teams and SharePoint follow Windows and Office locale settings?

 

It feels like the more high level features are added, the harder it will be to fix the low level stuff that is vital to making these products work well outside the US.

Copper Contributor

Has the changeable background been released yet?

This post can be the most liked Teams blog post ever. Some much good news at once. :hearteyes:

Copper Contributor

Good Improvements. Cannot wait until some are available. 

Steel Contributor
So, Private Channels isn't as private as I would like, having played with it for half an hour. Guests have to be added to the main team first, then to the private channel. That means at a minimum they see the General Channel, and they would also see all other regular channels. As a result, they can also see all members of the team, since they can see the general channel. There is no way to invite them exclusively to the private channel and restrict their visibility to that alone.
Iron Contributor

@Ed Hansberry I think the feature you're asking for is called "wormholing", which I heard was being considered. 

Steel Contributor

so.... 2021 release @Mike Williams 

 

And "wormholing" was exactly the word... right on the tip of my tongue. :|

Copper Contributor

Great features in MS Teams...

Copper Contributor

All Teams, but at least Multiwindow - That’s one giant leap for mankind! Thx.

Iron Contributor

Any update on when expansion modules/sidecars will be supported on Teams phones Per Yealink and other vendors they are waiting on Microsoft.

Thanks.

 

 

Copper Contributor

It would be great to be able to highlight channels with different colors so we could see project priority hierarchy at a glance. Can this be done? 

Iron Contributor
@ Ed Hansberry @Mike Williams Wouldn't a private chat with the specific members be good enough for this situation? I'm curious as to the scenario you are considering here if you feel like sharing?
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