What’s new in Microsoft Teams – March round up
Published Mar 11 2019 12:00 PM 62.6K Views

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve to be the hub for teamwork for workers in all roles and across industries. Additionally, new updates to the Microsoft Graph Lifecycles enables you to automate processes and provide familiar experiences to your users. Keep reading to learn more:

 

Collaborate more efficiently

 

Work together with up to 5,000 people in the same team

Bring large teams together to collaborate in a single workspace. All new and existing teams can now accommodate up to 5,000 members, double the previous limit. Additionally, the distribution list import has being increased to 3,500 users so you can easily populate the team.

 

Work with confidence: new features and resources for IT admin

 

Become an expert in Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Teams Training modules for IT Pros

Need to know how to successfully plan, configure and run Teams to provide the best possible experience to your end users? These training modules will help you develop key skills around Microsoft Teams to accomplish just that. Modules always consist of a video and PowerPoint deck. Learn more here.

 

Empower workers in all roles and across industries

 

Microsoft Teams continues to expand to meet the needs of Firstline workers

At the National Retail Federation conference in January, we announced new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to help Firstline Workers achieve more. Now, in a new Mechanics video, watch Keara James and Jeremy Chapman show you the new customizable Teams mobile experience, Shifts, Praise and more. And discover new ways to customize the Teams experience with a new IT configuration policy to create role-based user experiences. Watch the video below to learn more.

 

 

Transform Classroom Time with 13 New Microsoft Teams Features

Microsoft Teams empowers students to find their voice and develop critical social emotional skills, while also giving teachers new capabilities for peer-to-peer professional development.  At the Bett 2019 tradeshow in London, we shared some big announcements directly with our favorite people on earth, teachers! We were thrilled to share these updates in 2 episodes of What’s New in Edu: part 1 and part 2. Also, you can check out the latest in Teams for Education in our recap blog here!

 

Facilitate a smoother transition for users with Unified Presence and Interoperability in Office 365 Government GCC  

Customers in the Government Community Cloud (GCC) environment can now provide a better experience to users during the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams:

  • Unified Presence aggregates presence states for users (i.e. available, busy or in a call) between Teams and Skype for Business. This ensures that a user has a single presence state regardless of the app and the device they use.

 

  • Interoperability enables a user that has been upgraded to Teams-Only mode to continue to communicate via chat with other users in the organization who are still using Skype for Business. This helps users stay productive while the organization transitions from Skype for Business to Teams. Learn more here.

Organize teamwork in your agency with the Planner tab in Teams for Office 365 Government GCC                                        

You can now simplify work management within Teams by adding a Planner tab to a team channel. With this integration, task management and team collaboration can happen in a single place. You can also see all tasks that are assigned to you using the Planner personal app within Teams. To add the planner tab, simply select the add a tab plus "+" sign in a Teams channel and choose Planner. Learn more here.

 

 

Organize teamwork with the Planner tab in TeamsOrganize teamwork with the Planner tab in Teams

 

Empower healthcare organizations with new capabilities in Teams

At the HIMSS conference in February, we announced new capabilities in Microsoft Teams to address the communication and collaboration challenges faced by healthcare customers. Capabilities include new secure messaging features coming to Teams, like priority notifications and message delegation. In addition, we announced the ability to integrate FHIR-enabled electronic health records (EHR) data with Teams, which will allow clinicians to securely access patient records, chat with other team members, and collaborate in a video meeting around that data. Read more here about the latest announcements.

With electronic health record integration, Teams enables clinicians to use a secure hub for coordinating patient careWith electronic health record integration, Teams enables clinicians to use a secure hub for coordinating patient care

Customize your team with 3rd party integrations

 

Updates to Microsoft Graph Lifecycles

Back in November, we announced the general availability of the Microsoft Graph APIs for Microsoft Teams, allowing our customers to better organize teams and channels, automate Teams lifecycles, and create pre-loaded, familiar experiences for your users. Since that announcement, we’ve been quietly adding additional features for automating team lifecycles. We wanted to recap some of the new features:

 

  • New types of teams (preview) – We’ve introduced seven new types of teams you can create through Microsoft Graph, including three types for education, two for retail, and two for healthcare.
  • Installing apps to teams using application permissions (preview) – We already support installing applications to teamswith user delegated permissions; we’re happy to announce that installing apps using application permissions is now available in preview. Application permissions are a great way to install or upgrade an app across all teams in a tenant, and to create new teams from scratch that include apps.
  • New types of tabs – Microsoft Graph allows you to add tabs to channels. We’ve recently enabled configuring five new types of tabs – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and document libraries.
  • New ways to send messages:
    • Replying to channel messages and sending channel messages with subjects and @mentions (preview) – We have a new and improved API for sending channel messages that adds new features like replies, subject lines, and @mentions. The new API is also aligned with the API to read channel messages.
    • Send them by email using the new (preview).
    • Use Microsoft Graph to install a bot that sends messages – Application permissions for installing apps to teams makes this more powerful than ever!
  • Deep links to channels (preview) – We’ve added the to complement webUrl, allowing you to create deep links to your channels and teams.
  • New superpowers for admins – Global admins and Microsoft Teams service admins can now access teams that they are not a member of, allowing them to create teamschange team settings, add and remove members, and create and delete channels and tabs.
  • Create teams with a single API call (preview) – You can now create a team with channels, apps, and tabs all in a single API call, making automated team lifecycles easier than ever.

What’s next?

Check out this tutorial to see how to take advantage of the Microsoft Graph APIs in your organization today.

 

New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps

 

Personalize your mobile experience in Teams with dark theme

You now have more options to customize your experience in the Teams mobile app with dark theme. You can enable it in the general section of the app settings.

 

Personalize your Teams mobile experience with dark themePersonalize your Teams mobile experience with dark theme

Make conversations and chats more personal with voice messages

You can now communicate with others using voice messages in private chat and channel conversations. From your mobile device, open a conversation, tap and hold the mic in the bottom right corner of your screen and start recording. Record up to 15 minutes, then tap Send to deliver your audio message.

 

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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

 

17 Comments
Steel Contributor

Cool feature regarding the voice messaging on mobile. We don't have this scenario set up in our environment with In-Tune yet... does it have speech to text when it is posted to a chat/channel?

Copper Contributor

Many of us are really excited about the ability to @ mention someone through Flow (and also email?) but we can't find any documentation to help make this work (other than a great write-up on bots).

 

I've tried a few things already, but nothing seems to work.  @Christopher Bryan is there anything showing how this actually works?

 

Thanks so much!

Copper Contributor

@Ed Gonzales I dont think that is currently doable as I have tried and searched. I had noticed the <at>@name</at> code when reviewing the content of a teams message with a mention in a Microsoft flow, however that didn't do anything.

Copper Contributor
Hi! Microsoft has stated that Teams will have full feature parity with StaffHub in March, som when will Home be available world wide? Also here in Sweden Praise hasn't surfaced yet either.

@Jtown80 @Ed Gonzales I have used atmentioning when using Graph API to post messages to Teams. 

It also requires the Mentions-block along with it that <at>. 

https://myteamsday.com/2019/03/05/sending-message-with-atmention-onto-a-channel-using-graphapi/

 

In Flow I think you need to use HTTP Connector to post the message. Out of the box Teams Connector does not support this. 

Copper Contributor
@ed_Gonzales the announcement made last week said, "We will begin rolling this out at the beginning of April and expect to be complete by the end of April."
Copper Contributor

@WoodyInit - Thank you for the quick response.  Here is a link to the email I received.  If the intent is for an April release, then it's worded oddly with "Messages posted to Teams from Flow can now contain @mentions of other users, so they will be notified when you post.".  Take a look and let me know what you think.

 

@Vesa Nopanen - Thank you, also, for the quick response.  I did see that part about the mentions block in the Bots documentation and was wondering if that was the missing piece in the announcement I saw.  I'm not at all a developer, so that's why I was pretty happy about the announcement.

 

Thanks again for the replies.

Copper Contributor

Reading the email again with the context from @WoodyInit and there is a gray block at the top talking about a virtual event.  The way it's blocked out, I took it to be separate (almost like an advertisement), but I will absolutely agree that it could also mean: everything below this thing pertains to the April Business Applications Release.

 

I'll take that as the meaning and let this thing rest for a couple of months.  Thanks all for the replies.

Copper Contributor

@Ed Gonzales , I see what you mean.  To confuse matters more the connectors page for Flow it shows some templates for what appear to Teams end points.  https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_teams/?slug=microsoft-teams

 

The roadmap for 49149 also point to April.

@Ed Gonzales You might want to check my another blog post about adding PowerApps to teams using Flow and HTTP Connector to get an idea how to post a at mention to Teams combining info on these two blogs.

https://myteamsday.com/2019/02/26/adding-a-company-powerapps-to-all-teams-using-flow-and-graph-api/

 

However, there is also a some way coming to notify users directly using a Flow Connector

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams%2CRolling%20Out&sear...

 

Copper Contributor

Great additions but one key feature is still missing: why does search not show wiki results? Absolutely crucial to compete with Confluence etc.

Copper Contributor

I guess my question is, why is everyone excited for Flow to do the @ mentions to notify people when Team's itself already does it? Unless im missing something specific I do not see this as something that is terribly exciting.

 

Now if i could kick a Flow off to make channels private so not everyone and their mother in the Team could see them or access them I would be excited.

Copper Contributor

@Justin Scarborough because currently if you have a Flow set up to automate work and post a message to Teams, the @ mention doesn't work, so you can't get any kind of notification in Teams. I setup a workflow so that if an item in a Sharepoint list changes status, it posts a message to Teams but due to the @ mention not working (it just appears as plain text) then you lose notification functionality which defeats the object for what I want it to do.

Copper Contributor

Still waiting for more Cloud PSTN features ... My clients aren't really waiting for voice messages or a personalised phone client. They are great though, dont't get me wrong! But for my feeling, not enough updates to optimise Teams for Cloud calling :(

Steel Contributor

Hello Guys,

 

this is all great news but please work on the ADmin console

 

This is so slow when you have 50k+ users

 

Thanks for the amazing work!

 

Best

Copper Contributor

I wish the compact mode could be release sooner. 

Copper Contributor

Awesome stuff.. Is there any way I can get an invite for the Teams Testflight iOS? Thanks in advance.. :)

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