We continue to bring new functionality to Microsoft Teams to help people do their best work. New Firstline capabilities empower your workers to be more productive, while new usage reports provide you insights on how people are using Teams in your organization. Read on to learn about everything that is new in February.
Communicate more effectively
Enabling effective communication across your organization requires giving people an environment where physical and virtual elements come together to deliver a seamless experience. We are introducing Microsoft Teams Rooms and Teams-Only mode to help you simplify and better integrate communication capabilities.
Transform your meetings with Microsoft Teams Rooms
We are rebranding Skype room systems as Microsoft Teams Rooms. From scheduling to managing a meeting, enjoy a seamless experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms. We are also adding new capabilities such as proximity detection, which streamlines the process of adding a room that is nearby and available to your existing meeting. Find out more here.
Transform every meeting with Microsoft Teams Rooms
Simplify how users communicate with Teams-Only Mode
Organizations now have more options in their journey to transition from Skype for Business to Teams with Teams-Only Mode. In this mode, Teams becomes the primary communication and collaboration tool for end users. From the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin center, administrators can easily upgrade specific users or their entire tenant. Found out more about this and other communications capabilities here.
Work with confidence: new features for IT admin
To foster teamwork across your organization, you need visibility into how people are using the tools you are providing. Additionally, you need to deliver tailored workspaces that meet your user needs in a repeatable and scalable way. You can now take advantage of the following Teams features to help you better support your organization:
Understand how your organization collaborates with new usage reports
Are your users taking full advantage of Microsoft Teams? You can now leverage the new analytics and reporting experience to get insights around key areas such as Teams usage, user activity and device usage. This information can help you track adoption of Teams and identify opportunities for change management efforts to improve teamwork across the organization. Learn more here.
Replicate your best Team's experience with Team Templates
Teams Templates let admins quickly pre-define a team’s channel, install apps, pin tabs, and more so you can focus on collaboration rather than spend time setting up. Found a team setup that works best for a type of project or workstyle in your organization? You will now be able to easily create new teams based on best practices and lessons learned by leveraging a new REST endpoint as part of the Microsoft Graph API.
Industry-based templates
We're also pleased to introduce Teams based template types, which are special templates that Microsoft created for specific industries. This initial launch will include:
- Education templates such as Class, Staff, and PLC teams
- Retail templates such as Store and Manager Collaboration teams
- Healthcare templates such as Ward and Hospital teams
Developers will also be able to extend these base templates to better fit their organizations workflows by leveraging the APIs found here .
Learn more about what you can achieve with Teams templates here.
Empower workers in all roles and across industries
People have different workstyles across industries, roles, and functions. Microsoft teams is committed to help every type of worker to their best with capabilities that meet their unique needs:
Enable your Firstline Workers to achieve more with Microsoft Teams
Improve the productivity of your Firstline Workforce with capabilities designed to meet their unique workstyle. The Shifts functionality in Teams simplifies the process of planning and creating schedules by offering key capabilities to both managers and workers. You will also be able to integrate your workforce management system with Teams soon by leveraging a Graph API. Additionally, we are empowering Firstline Workers with key mobile features such as location sharing, record and share audio messages, and smart camera. The mobile experience is customizable to provide workers and IT the ability to choose the most relevant capabilities for their work. Find out more about here.
Customize your team with Bots and 3rd party integrations
Build more powerful bots with the Preview Release of .Net Teams Bot Builder v4 SDK
Enable your bots to become more impactful by leveraging key capabilities such as fetching a list of channels in a team, creating a 1:1 chat with a specific users, or accepting messages only from specific tenants. Learn more here.
Monthly Spotlight - Apps in Teams: Karmabot , MindMeister, and More!
We are constantly adding new and improved apps to our Teams experience and plan on highlighting a few of our apps that have been making major waves to further enable collaboration.
Karmabot helps you motivate your team leveraging the power of machine learning and natural language. Learn more here.
MindMeister enables you to brainstorm ideas and visualize project plans alongside your team members. The new update allows you to view your entire dashboard directly from teams. Find out more here.
The Connector for Jira server helps you stay on top of development issues by notifying you when an issue is created or updated. This notification includes critical details such as a summary of the issue, priority, and assignee. Find out more here.
Stay on top of issues with the Connector for Jira Server
The new Atlassian’s Confluence Cloud experience facilitates access to your documentation with the ability to open a confluence page in a Teams tab and creating Confluence child pages directly from Teams. Find out more here.
Access your information faster with the new Confluence cloud experience
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 to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.
— Christopher Bryan, Product Marketing Manager Microsoft Teams