What’s New in Microsoft Teams | April 2019
Published Apr 30 2019 03:30 PM 66.5K Views
Microsoft

In case you missed it… here is a round of up of what’s new with Microsoft Teams in the past month.

 

Microsoft Teams on Surface Hub

Microsoft Whiteboard is available in Teams in commercial preview

Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings empowers meeting attendees from the same tenant to participate in the conversation regardless of the device you use or where you are. Whether joining from the meeting room or remotely, you can start a new board in the Teams meeting (currently supported on desktop, web and Surface Hub – coming soon to mobile). The board is automatically shared with meeting attendees. Users can ink together in real-time on the board.  On Surface Hub, users can launch the native Whiteboard app to enable an even richer collaboration experience with features such as sticky notes, images, and gridlines.  To enable Whiteboard in Teams meetings on Surface Hub, please turn on feature here.

 

Switch cameras automatically

Microsoft Teams on Surface Hub now supports switching cameras automatically. The camera will use motion and face detection to focus on who’s talking.

whiteboard surface hub.png

 

Introducing Praise
Who’s awesome? You’re awesome.


Introducing Praise, the new way to show your appreciation and encourage each other at work. Send in a 1:1 chat or post it to a channel for the entire team. Select *** below the compose box, then select Praise at the top. Choose what kind of badge you wish to send and personalize your acknowledgment with a message. When you send it, we'll @mention them in the message to make sure they don't miss it. Learn more here.

praise2.png

Request to add others to teams
Now you can request on behalf of someone else to join a private team. Teams can be created as either private, where admins control membership, or public, where anyone in the organization is welcome to join. Right-click on a team name, and select Add member. Search for people by name or email. Team owners will get a notification that they have a new request, and people you've added will get a notification once they've been added to the team.

requestadd.gif

 

Org-wide teams now have larger size limits
Org-wide teams have higher size limits, so they can have up to 5000 members in a team.  Admins, feel free to add away! Create that big team you've always wanted. Learn more on our admin help page.


Show and hide teams to stay organized
We are making it easier for you keep an uncluttered teams list. What used to be Favorite and Remove from favorites is now Show and Hide. Choose which teams and channels you want to show in your teams list and hide the rest. You'll still get notified when @mentioned, they just won't clutter your teams list.


To try it out, go to a team or channel name in your teams list and select More options ***> Hide. Want to get a team back in your list? Scroll to the bottom and open the Hidden teams list.

hideteams.gif

 

Work with confidence: new features and resources for IT admins Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module General Availability
We are excited to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module. This PowerShell module allows you to manage the lifecycle of teams within your organization. For more detail and guidance, see our recent blog post.

 


Make Teams available to all users at your organization

We have made it easier than ever to get started on Teams, with the Microsoft Teams Commercial Cloud Trial!

How does this trial work? Users who have an AAD Commercial domain or an Office 365 license that does not include Teams, can still use Teams with their work email address. The Microsoft Teams Commercial Cloud Trial is a fully functional version of Microsoft Teams valid for one- year per tenant The trial is applicable even if the user does not have Microsoft Teams license and can include up to 500,000 users per tenant, with 2 GB of SharePoint Online storage per user.


How does a user sign up for this trial? Eligible users can sign up for the trial offer by logging into Teams here. Simply enter your organization’s credentials/email and you’ll be automatically routed into the trial experience.


How do I manage this? Office 365 admins have several ways to monitor and control Microsoft Teams Commercial Cloud Trials in their organization: they can disable the use of trials, convert trials into assigned licenses, and upgrade to an Office 365 SKU with Microsoft Teams. As of May 2019, we are making it easier to manage all end-user initiated Teams trials. All of the Teams trials started by company users will be owned and controlled by the billing admin of the tenant, making it easy to manage and consistent with the other Microsoft 365 offers. Any existing Teams Trial licenses will be migrated to this new license when the associated users log into Teams in near future. Once this support is rolled out, users will be migrated automatically the next time they log into Teams. No admin actions are required. Learn more about Commercial Cloud Trial management.

 

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. And take a look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap for the latest updates. 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.

Marissa Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Teams

 

22 Comments
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Great to have the GA PowerShell module!

Iron Contributor

"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."

 

Please stop asking us to submit ideas via User Voice until you actually start giving any trustworthy updates on the ideas submitted there.

 

Here's the history on the status you have given on 'Support for Private Channels', the highest voted idea on MS Teams:

  • Feb 2017: Private Channels is on it’s way
  • Mar 2017: Private Teams launched
  • Apr 2017: OK, you still need Private Channels
  • Jun 2017: Under review
  • Sep 2017: It’s complicated
  • Oct 2017: Lots of resources on this. Actively working on it. Top priority feature. Complicated, so probably not in the next month.
  • Nov 2017: We are aiming for early next year (2018)
  • Jan 2018: Actively being worked upon. Aiming for early this calendar year (2018)
  • Feb 2018: Still aiming for early this calendar year (2018)
  • Mar 2018: Still in the works
  • Jun 2018: Still in the works. Working hard
  • Aug 2018: Still actively being worked upon
  • Sep 2018: Private channels is still actively in development, hoping for clearance to share details.
  • Feb 2019: Rest assured we are working on this feature.

Stop pretending you care what we post in User Voice.

Great new stuff! 

Iron Contributor

Thanks for the constant updates! Would like to finally see a transfer directly to voicemail for calling plan users. Receptionists NEED this function.

Copper Contributor

It's so funny that the most popular comment about Microsoft ignoring the needs of its customers is more popular than the article itself. 

Copper Contributor

Making Channels private should be given higher priority. Please let us know the actual date for this feature

Microsoft
Regardless of what some may thing about UserVoice, everyone should continue to use it to provide feedback. Yes, sometimes the "easy things" may take longer to complete than some might like or want, but the Product Teams do listen to customers and take their feedback seriously. When you look back and realize that Teams is less than 3 years old as a product, but has countless more features and capabilities than any of its competitor products, sometimes you may just have to be a bit more patient on the features your organization demands now.
Iron Contributor

I am still not convinced that private channel will really benefit Teams. I see the use cases for it and can imagine many of you are waiting for it. But the feature itself will whack all the underlying structures and concepts (Groups memberships, SharePoint permissions, Apps usage in tabs and breaking permissions here, and so on). There are plenty of things that will be re-thought regarding governance and processes. The time that the team needs for implementation just reflects this and does not surprise me.

@Rob_Dentsu, try not to confuse the speed of delivery with the lack of care for feedback. There is no other team in the Office Apps and Services division with more resources than Microsoft Teams. Believe me, they want to get Private Channels right before they release it. There’s no better place for our feedback to be quantified and publicly discussed in one place than UserVoice.  

Let me ask this though. Would you prefer that Microsoft doesn’t add updates as regularly to the suggestion in UserVoice? That they should only post an update when they have progress to announce? Would you like more official comments and transparency on the complexities they are dealing with? There is a line that has to be drawn in how transparent Microsoft Teams can be, before they expose themselves to their competition and give away competitive advantage. 

 

Rest assured, Microsoft are actively testing Private Channels in ‘Private Preview’ with a number of their customers, at scale. It’s just they can’t talk about it, nor can their customers talk about it, because it’s private and occurring within a private channel of it’s own if you understand my meaning. 

Copper Contributor

Longing for the day when I can rename the unusable "general" channel. Any idea when?

Copper Contributor

Most looking forward to adding and enhancing calling features for those firms like mine who have adopted Teams as a business phone system. Lots of things are still lacking, but hopefully, features and reliability features come along soon.

 

I personally appreciate more frequent updates, even if it is "still working on it." That way we know that an item is still on the radar and hasn't just dropped off due to shifting priorities and focus of the development team.

@Rob_Dentsu 

>Feb 2019: Rest assured we are working on this feature.

You missed March 2019 when Microsoft announced that Private Channels are coming later in 2019. While I agree there's not a big difference between "we are working on this", a committed timeframe is a new development.

 

I can assure you that architecturally it is not a simple solution. And while that's not intended to be an excuse, it is intended to say that cherry-picking one of the most difficult to implement features is sort of not fair as using evidence that MS doesn't care about User Voice.

Brass Contributor

I think MS should take more care in the announcement of features. There are frequent (my term) announcements of new features well prior to their general release. Additionally, there is typically no schedule stated for said rollout. A great example of this is the new calendar app. MS stated "coming in April". It is May. Some people definitely have it, but most that I've spoken to don't. There is no guidance, no updates, no version number suggestion, etc. from MS. If you are going to announce an upcoming feature (or something just announce a feature as "here"), I think MS should instead give more information on what that actually means as opposed to going for the positive PR with "new features".

Brass Contributor

"... up to 5000 members in a team" - YAY! So excited to have this team capacity. This allows us to leverage Teams for projects we previously could not. 

Copper Contributor

Sorry. For me not a single practically usable feature for me  in April.

Copper Contributor

Wow!! PowerShell is most useful. 

 

Have a question over here. In outlook, Is there a way to change the presence from Skype to Teams? We are aware Teams oly mode would help us to achieve this. However we would like to use both Skype and Teams for certain period of time (mainly for user adaptability) . So Is there way to achieve the presence.? 

 

Thanks in advance!!!

Copper Contributor

@Ganesh_Prabu - This might be on the areas that is "Broken" - My company uses Jabber/Teams/Outlook - With Teams replacing jabber soon - But for now it doesnt show the correct presence for some...I would imagine switching it from Teams only to Island or SFB w/ Teams for Collab or SFB w/ Teams collab and meetings could work

Copper Contributor

As long as you dont fix https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17750851-i-want-to-use-multipl... and https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16911544-allow-any-emoji-as-a-... Slack will be the preferred choice!

Why does it take several years to implement such important highly requested features?

Brass Contributor

Ability to hide Teams - nice, but you made it a bit inconsistent with some other tools, which allow to "star" stuff as favorites.

@Kassidy Klink 

Additionally, there is typically no schedule stated for said rollout. A great example of this is the new calendar app. MS stated "coming in April". It is May. Some people definitely have it, but most that I've spoken to don't. There is no guidance, no updates, no version number suggestion, etc. from MS."

You'll usually find more details in your Microsoft 365 Message Center. The well written messages state when the feature will start rolling out to Targetted Release, when to Standard Release and when they expect to complete rollout. But I don't think you'll ever get a date specific for your tenant.

Copper Contributor

Any update on when Calendar will replace the Meeting? Thanks in advance. 

Copper Contributor

All good Maria but how can one make the teams "team" to actually respond to requests? It looks like every time we have a question, the request goes into a black hole for eternity. Since HIMMS I have been trying to reach people in Teamsforhealthcare and to this date I do not have any response from them. Needless to say this does not help with adoption. Can you help me reach their ear?

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