Your favorite engineering team at Microsoft has been on the road this week to the Big Apple. We met with end users and customers in big and small organizations using Teams.
Every city is different, and they tend to have their own feedback theme. New York City is a finance town, so we found ourselves talking a lot about security, compliance, and IT admin features. If you want to know more about how excellent our security features are, check out our last blog post – which is also my first weekend reading recommendation:
Reading recommendation #1: Top Features of Microsoft Teams & Information Protection in Office 365
Our security expert Ansuman Acharya talks through Teams top security features. His post resulted in this positive article from tech writer Tony Redmond, which is also a good read.
Reading recommendation #2: “How To” on Teams Meetings
From our third-party developer team, Mansoor Malik gives a deep-dive into how to best use the meetings function in Teams. Great read to aid your user adoption efforts.
Reading recommendation #3: The Microsoft Teams feedback portal
I polled our user community this week about what they wanted us to blog about next. The overwhelming response was for a comprehensive update on our top UserVoice items. I know some of you have told me it has been a bit too quiet in our Release Notes, but trust me, that doesn’t mean we’ve been quiet here in Engineering! The team is working hard and with urgency since GA to continue to improve our product. Here are some updates for you:
- An update for the most popular feature: guest access. This is targeted for June. :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:
- Private Channels: we are trying to figure this out. It requires problem solving how to manage SharePoint sites, multiple address book entries, etc. It’s not an easy solution, as you can imagine. We will keep you updated on progress.
- Use same presence as Skype for Business: we’re working to bring better presence alignment to you over the next few months.
- Notifications for all messages in a channel: completed! And yes, your ask to include connectors in this function is currently in progress.
- Drag and Drop attachments: This has been done for a while, but I kept it in here because not everyone knows they can do this in Teams. It’s a cool feature -- please spread the word! (And if you are experiencing that this doesn’t work with files in Outlook, please add your voice here.)
- Auto scroll down when new messages come in: Thanks for helping us reopen this previously “completed” item with your continued feedback. We’ve identified the bugs and have fixed this for you. You should see many improvements here!
- Ability to see who is in a channel: we’re looking to have this in product by summer.
- Compact chat layout: thanks to everyone who participated in the live round tables, user research groups, and the hundreds of messages that have flooded in. You will start to see incremental changes over time as we move to condense the design more.
- Code snippets: I know how bad our users who are developers want this – we feel your pain! This is in progress, and you will be filled with delight and sunshine when you see it in product in late May.
- Allow use of existing OneNotes/documents for channels: We’re talking with the OneNote team about this, and they know this is a popular request. You can emphasize your need for this feature on their UserVoice, which is here: https://onenote.uservoice.com/
- Markdown support: Done! I know some of you want additional markdown support, which we have on our backlog. You can continue to advocate for this item here.
- Linux client: we were just recently in Europe where this ask was echoed to us by everyone we met. We’ve had a growing interest in this feature. Please continue to vote and advocate for this, as the growing numbers helps prioritize our workflow.
- Remove the need to constantly log in: we fixed this originally, but many of you came to me with user logs that this was only partially improved and still suffered sporadic performance issues. We’ve put through a number of bug fixes, and you should see improvements to this right now. If you continue to experience being logged out, please send me your logs (sparavi@microsoft.com) and I will get them to the engineering team ASAP.
- Ability to archive channels: we’re actively working on this. Coming soon to a Teams version near you!
- Lastly, mobile parity. For all of you heavy mobile Teams users, I’ve got a ton of good news here. Just make sure to update your apps to get these features.
- Android
- Easily add or remove team members
- Create new channels
- Rename group chats and add new members to existing chats
- Update your profile picture
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
- iOS
- Connect face to face using immersive video calls
- Tailored user experience for iPad
- Easily add or remove team members
- Create new channels
- Rename group chats and add new members to existing chats
- Improved image viewer lets you zoom and pan easily
- Improved support for previewing files in conversations
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Windows Phone
- Single sign-in with other Office 365 apps
- You can now @mention teams and channels
- You can open emails sent to a channel
- You can share Microsoft Teams content in other mobile apps
- Improved mobile support for Connector messages
- Support for certificate based authentication
- Support for mobile device management
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Android
I want to note that even though I have only provided updates to some of the top user-requested items in this blog, please know we do not work on items solely on quantity of votes. Every request is reviewed closely.
Your feedback and engagement makes Teams better and better. Thank YOU!
Sincerely,