What’s new in Microsoft Teams – August round up
Published Aug 02 2018 11:00 AM 39.7K Views
Microsoft

From offering a free version to hosting live events, Microsoft Teams continues to evolve as the hub for teamwork in Office 365 to empower teams around the world to achieve more. If you have questions about Teams, join us for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) web session where experts from the Teams engineering and marketing team can provide you with answers. The AMA will be on August 9th 9:00am to 10:00am PT. Visit Ask Me Anything (AMA) to sign up and continuing reading below to learn more about our newest capabilities.

 

Communicate more effectively

 

Easily translate a message into the language of your choice.Easily translate a message into the language of your choice.

 

Get important notifications while in ‘Do not Disturb’ mode

Want to focus on a task but still enable certain people to reach you? Then set your status to ‘Do not disturb’ and still receive calls and 1:1 chats from certain people or phone numbers. To set it up, click your profile pic > Settings > Privacy and follow the prompts.

 

PowerPoint in meetings just got better

If you've got bandwidth constraints, you can now share just a PowerPoint file (this action uses less bandwidth than a video stream). Participants can navigate through the slides privately, read ahead or look back to review something they missed. Learn more here.

 

Answer Auto Attendant and Call Queue calls directly from Teams

Guess what? Microsoft Phone System Auto Attendant is now generally available, and Call Queues is in preview. These new capabilities allow you to receive and answer calls from Skype for Business Online’s Auto Attendant and Call Queues, directly from Teams. Read here to learn more.

 

Receive and answer calls from Skype for Business’ Auto Attendant Call toastReceive and answer calls from Skype for Business’ Auto Attendant Call toast

Receive and answer calls from Skype for Business’ Call Queue Call toastReceive and answer calls from Skype for Business’ Call Queue Call toast

Collaborate more efficiently

 

Now available: Free version of Microsoft Teams

A free version of Microsoft Teams is now available worldwide in 40 languages. This free version (for up to 300 people) includes unlimited chat messages and search, built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups and so much more. Read the full announcement here and be sure to check out the Microsoft Mechanics video to learn more.

 

 

Take private notes and get the whole picture with the new Wiki app

Now you can access your own private wiki and channel wiki pages in one place—the new Wiki app! Find it by selecting More apps   on the left side of Teams, then Wiki. In the app, keep your own private notes on the Personal tab, see all the wiki pages you're a part of on the All tab, or get back to ones you've used recently on the Recent tab.

 

Access your personal wiki from anywhere in Teams

Check out the new wiki slash command. In the command box at the top of Teams, type /wiki, then press Enter and type your note. Press Enter again when you're finished, and the note will go right to the Personal tab in the Wiki app.

 

Customize your team with 3rd party integrations

 

Monthly Spotlight - New Apps in Teams: BitBucket, Jira, MailClark and more!

We are constantly adding new apps to our Teams experience and plan on highlighting a few of our apps that have been making major waves to further enable collaboration.

 

Bitbucket allows team members to collaborate on code written by developers. Start a conversation with the Bitbucket bot and create a new pull request or search of an existing one that you’ve already created. Learn more here.

 

 Start a conversation with the Bitbucket bot to collaborate on code.Start a conversation with the Bitbucket bot to collaborate on code.

Jira bot enables team members to plan, track and release software. Moreover, with Jira bot you can easily find issues, assign them to team members, make edits, log time against an issue and more. Learn more here.

 

Use Jira bot to track and troubleshoot software issues.

 

MailClark lets you collectively manage external messages (email, social media, live chat) all while in Teams. Learn more here.

 

 Use MailClark to respond to various messages without leaving the Teams app.Use MailClark to respond to various messages without leaving the Teams app.

 

Also, be sure to check out this video spotlighting Wrike for Teams and learn more about how you can collaborate on projects and tasks with your team.

 

Lastly, please note that we’ve had updates to Soapbox, Jell and Site24x7. Check out some of other new apps such as Droplr and please visit AppSource to learn more.

Work with confidence: new features for IT admins

 

New features for IT Admins

The Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center is continuing to evolve to meet the needs of admins. A few of the updates include:

  • A fully integrated Call Analytics Dashboard to provide an overview of call and meeting quality
  • Updates in user level policies and organization settings including managing policies for messaging, meeting, calling and guest access in the Admin Center and via PowerShell
  • Easy access to the Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center

 Read the full announcement here to learn more.

 

New data and reports for Teams

Usage analytics in Power BI for Microsoft 365 – now generally available – allows you to understand how your organization is using Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams. Usage analytics includes a Teams usage report and let’s you analyze how your employees utilizes various capabilities in Teams like chat, channels, and meetings. Read the full announcement here.

 

Now available: Microsoft Teams Online Courses for IT Pros

Our latest free course provides IT Pros with important information on how to plan for and enable Microsoft Teams for their users including enabling, configuring and best practices for using Teams. Read the full announcement here and visit this link to sign up for the course.   

 

Microsoft Teams - Ask Me Anything

If you have questions about Teams, join us for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) web session where experts from the Teams engineering and marketing team can provide you with answers. The AMA will take place on August 9th 9:00am to 10:00am PT in the Microsoft Teams AMA Group. Add the event to your calendar and view in your time zone here. Read the full announcement here.

 

 

New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps

Check out some of our newest capabilities on mobile.

 

Meetings: Share a PowerPoint file during a call or meeting and view meeting notes on your mobile device.

 

Calls: Forward incoming calls to your call group, transfer a call immediately, or consult with the recipient over chat first with incoming calls indicate if they’re from a call queue or an auto attendant.

 

Other improvements for mobile: share videos from your device's photo gallery in chat and channel messages and copy a channel's email address to forward emails directly to channels.

 

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.

 

—Keara James, product marketing manager Microsoft Teams

 

 

 

13 Comments
Silver Contributor

You forgot to mention the newest "feature" - invisible messages :D

Silver Contributor

I think it is time for Microsoft to pause on adding more bots and apps and work on stability and reliability of Teams.

Bronze Contributor

FYI - the URL for the PowerPoint sharing is wrong. It has https://support.officeppe.com instead of https://support.office.com in the link.

 

Nice feature. Will be sharing this with the sales team.

Brass Contributor

Will the metadata ever become customizable for files in Microsoft Teams? It seems odd that such a basic document-management feature is still not a thing, while being such a big tool on Sharepoint. It would make it so much easier to search for specific types of files (v.g. reports, executive summaries, filings, different kinds of contracts) across Teams.

Copper Contributor

I think it is time for Microsoft to pause on adding more bots and apps and work on stability and reliability of Teams. Please solve real problems, invisible messages, slow performance on desktop and the most votes on usersvoice. User suffered and complained everyday and IT is wailing...........

Brass Contributor

For those who interested in the free Teams offering, I wrote a short admin guide to help to keep the organization on the safe side of the fence.

https://kolislab.com/free-microsoft-teams-admin-guide/

 

Iron Contributor

Please don't forget the "forward call" option in the toast notification. This was dropped from Skype for Business, only to be added back later. If this will be the SfB replacement, this is a necessary function, especially for assistants. Having to answer the call prior to forwarding isn't always feasible.

 

Some nice improvements! Looking forward to the continued evolution of Teams and to increased reliability and predictability, which are paramount if this is to become the phone.

Ryan

Copper Contributor

Will we get the ability to schedule meetings on the mobile app on iOS and Android?

Brass Contributor

Can we get Teams mobile to pull contact info incoming calls?

 

When receiving calls, if a caller is outside my company, but I have a contact for them in my Outlook contacts (which is also on my iPhone), it won't pull the name.

 

Weirdly, if I then go a contact on the iPhone and then back to Teams, that contact info then shows for that call.  So Teams sees the contacts.  It just won't pull from them until you go to each contact individually.

 

Teams should be able to pull contact info while the phone is ringing. 

Steel Contributor
Still no compact mode. This is the #1 UI request over on UserVoice with over 5000 votes, and the #3 request overall. The team announced that they were working on this on 9 February 2017. (Yes, 2017 - this is now over 555 days ago.) Over 18 months of "working on it" with no feedback, no mockups, no timeline, no screenshots, no evidence of any work on this basic requirement.
Copper Contributor

Totally agree with Sean Ellis.  Compact mode is crucial.  Our IT team is still using slack partially for this reason alone.  Seriously....this shouldn't be that hard.  Look at Slack...heck...look at Skype.

Iron Contributor

I'd love to see a Search function for the wiki.  Wikis aren't much use without one

Copper Contributor

/wiki command in the search bare is not there anymore... what happened to it?

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