What’s new in Microsoft Teams – December round up
Published Dec 18 2018 02:29 PM 38.7K Views

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve as the hub for teamwork in Office 365 helping you achieve more. Upcoming voice capabilities will enable you to support different communication scenarios, while new manageability and automation functionality will allow you to better support Teams across your organization.

 

Communicate more effectively

 

People across your organization communicate in different ways depending on their work style, role, and preferences. Microsoft teams is bringing new voice features to help you address your company needs:

  • Can’t answer the phone right now?
    • Group Call Pickup allows you to create a custom group with colleagues that can answer your calls.
    • Shared line Appearance enables you to choose a delegate to answer call on your behalf.

  • Want to connect a caller with someone who is hard to contact?
    • Call Park simplifies the process of connecting callers with users that are not easily reachable by using unique codes to aid targeted users to retrieve calls using a Microsoft Teams client.

  • Need to restrict call routing based on location?
    • Location-Based Routing helps you stay compliant with local regulation with by allowing you to restrict the routing of calls between VoIP endpoints and PSTN endpoints based on the location.

Find out more these features here.

 

Work with confidence: new features for IT admin

 

Fostering effective collaboration among your users requires that your admin team have the capabilities they need. From improved visibility and control of all teams across your organization to streamlining key parts of the Teams lifecycle, we are bringing new manageability and automation capabilities to help you better support teamwork across your organization:

  • Manage your teams directly from the Admin Center: A list of all teams in your organization is now available to all customers directly in the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center. Simply click on “Teams” in the left navigation and select “Manage Teams” to see this list. From here, you can manage membership, add or remove channels, and change settings. Additionally, you can quickly create a new team, customize it, and add members allowing you to better support your users.

  • New Teams Administrator Roles: Are you responsible for administering Teams in your organization? New Azure Active Directory roles are now available to all customers. Users can be assigned the Teams admin roles via the Azure Admin Portal. Simply find the appropriate user profile in the Azure Active Directory and click on “Directory Role” from the left navigation. Next, click “Add Role” and select the Teams admin role you want to assign from the available options.

  • Automate the Teams Lifecycle with new Graph APIs: Save time while providing users a workspace tailored to their needs by streamlining the process of creating and customizing teams with new Graph API’s.

Learn more about these new capabilities here.

 

Customize your team with 3rd party integrations

 

Monthly Spotlight - Apps in Teams: Disco, Q, and Trello!

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.

 

Disco (formerly known as Growbot) helps you build stronger cultures, celebrate employee achievements and reinforce their core values. Learn more here.

Recognize great work with Disco.Recognize great work with Disco.

 

Q is an AI assistant that provides you critical information based on what you are working on. It sorts through millions of articles and sources to pull in only the most relevant ones. Learn more here.

Funnel critical information with Q.Funnel critical information with Q.

 

Trello empowers you to stay on top of your project tasks with the Trello Personal app in Microsoft Teams. This app gives users access to assigned cards across all their Trello boards for different teams where they are contributing. Learn more here.

Stay on top of your tasks with Trello.Stay on top of your tasks with Trello.

 

The Site24x7’s updated app for Microsoft Teams provides your DevOps teams with tools and services to help you avoid downtime, including a Site24x7 bot that provides real-time data and the ability to add custom all-in-one dashboards to a Teams channel. Learn more here.

Avoid downtime with the Site24x7’s updated app for Microsoft Teams.Avoid downtime with the Site24x7’s updated app for Microsoft Teams.

 

Lucidchart for Microsoft Teams helps you bring your team together to work on documents such as flowcharts or network diagrams. Learn more here

Improve collaboration with visuals using Lucidchart.Improve collaboration with visuals using Lucidchart.

 

Decisions for Microsoft Teams empowers groups that meet regularly to have better meetings with key functionality such as viewing a list of upcoming meetings, reviewing recent meeting notes, and accessing past meeting outcomes. Learn more here.

 

 

Discover how organizations are transforming teamwork

 

Attractive workplace at SAP – thanks to Office 365
With over 400,000 customers relying on their software and services, SAP is one of the largest technology solution providers in the world. The Germany based organization employs more than 93,000 people across 130 countries, all of whom can choose their OS, among other tools. Due to GDPR requirements along with the rise of geographically distributed teams, SAP introduced Teams as their single communication and collaboration tool of choice. Thanks to viral adoption, Teams has rapidly enabled SAP’s intelligent workplace. Read SAP’s full story here!

 

Ricoh uses Microsoft Teams as the communication platform to change its business model and foster co-creation
Ricoh is a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company that seeks to empower their customers’ digital workplaces. Prior to Teams, Ricoh was using a collaboration tool introduced in 1994 and consisting of email and document sharing. This led to an inundation of email, which hindered creativity and took time away from customers. Now with 75% of the organization using Teams for chat, meetings, co-authoring, and more, employees can now engage in real-time, creating a more agile work culture. Read Ricoh’s full story here!

 

Establishing group-wide communication, promoting employee interaction in a wall-less environment with team collaboration hub
The Sega Sammy Group is a Japan-based entertainment company that creates sophisticated products and operates a resort in South Korea. The result of a 2004 merger, Sega Sammy has encountered a series of IT challenges in its effort to grow. Departments were using different chat tools, leading to communication issues and raising security concerns. After implementing Teams, employees leveraged not just chat, but the entire solution, holding conference calls and accessing OneNote and Planner all within Teams. Teams has enabled greater collaboration and flexibility across Sega Sammy, transforming their culture of work. Read Sega Sammy’s full story here!

 

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.

18 Comments

Admin Center is awesome, needs to be finished out and polished up but this first round of Teams management is nice to have including the admin roles! 

Silver Contributor

Should be an option to also delete a team from admin center.

Copper Contributor

We should have an option to build custom RBAC role like in Skype for Business. Example we'd like to grant "Manage teams" tab to some people but without exposing access to other features like changing org-wide policies etc. Right now "Manage teams" comes only with full Teams (and SfB Online!) admin.

Brass Contributor

Please add an option to send a caller to someone's Voicemail. It's the one feature we need for receptionists before we can switch off our VOIP system.

Copper Contributor

The only thing preventing us form moving to Teams is the lack of private channels. I don't understand why this isn't a priority .  

It is a priority. The issue is, you have to involved all the other Teams to make it work, not just the Teams team so it's going to take longer to get onto those development radars etc. I personally think Private channels are over rated. Slack channels are nothing but Teams in Microsoft Teams and those are private and they have sub channels but everyone see's it differently due to the fact that channels are part of Teams. 

Copper Contributor

@Christopher Bryan thanks for all these updates. Any indication as to when Shifts will release? All the information associate with the sunset of StaffHub says shifts would launch in teams in November. On the November thread there were a lot of unanswered questions around the launch of shifts, and there is no mention of shifts in this December release.

Copper Contributor

 @Chris Webb I think that holds true in small organizations where multiple teams might make some sense. I work in an organization of 35,000. Having a new team for every "group" I need to contain conversations to is overwhelming to think about. It also makes larger team communication difficult as it might require someone to be in 10-20 teams or more. Then they might be in 5 different channels per team. All of this could be for a single Division within our organization. You gotta pray you're not working across the various divisions. If we can have Privacy at the team level, we should be able to have privacy at the channel level.

 

The request has 15,000 + votes in the Microsoft Uservoice site. It has DOUBLE the votes of any other request. Yet, it still goes unfulfilled. 

It would def be nice. I still think shared channels has more value than private. But they are working on it and it’s a matter of time now. I’ve seen hints of it in demos recently and they have been working on it pretty heavily. I think having to wrap up on the Skype feature set slowed down innovation efforts but now that most of those are done we are going to start seeing new stuff start rolling out now! Hopefully sooner than later! 

Copper Contributor

We are still missing the dedicated ring-device like configurable in Skype for Business. At the moment, when someone is calling me and im speaking with a colleague and dont look at my screen, I miss the call because it only rings in my headset and shows a message on my screen. I think this is a basic.

Steel Contributor

When will mac and PC installs be possible without admin rights?

 

When will the long promised Chrome video and desktop sharing via the web be available?  Ignite said coming soon. 

Copper Contributor

Yes I’m also interested to know when Shifts will be available. I would like to take advantage of this type of app and do not wish to stand up a new StaffHub environment. It was scheduled for release in November / December. Even an update on a revised public release date would be useful.

Copper Contributor

A very useful function found in the Lync On premise version was Response Groups with the ability to sign in and out. This function was very helpful and fluid for our first line workers as they would sign into a response group to receive calls during their support shift. There was also a supervisor utility that would show the status of everyone in the Response Group. if they were in a call, signed in or out etc. Once SfB online was introduced these features were never available. 

My question is since Microsoft is making a push for Teams to be much more first line focused (ie. Shifts, Planner etc. ) wouldn't it be great and make sense to enable this functionality in Teams online again? 

Bronze Contributor

@stevemaughan: If you create a Call Queue and enable the "Agent opt out" option, your agents can sign in and out by visiting http://aka.ms/cqsettings. Unfortunately there isn't any supervisor utility but it is possible to see the opt-out status of your agents as well as the current queue size using the Get-CSHuntGroup PowerShell cmdlet. Another limitation is that only Serial and Attendant routing methods are available (i.e. options like "Longest idle" and "Round robin" don't exist). Hopefully these features are in development.

Copper Contributor

From one of my end users:

 

"In October. I was able to upload links to websites onto teams. In addition, I was able to click on these links in teams and have them directly open the webpage. Now, when I am in teams URLs and PDFs no longer work."

 

If they open the links or PDFs in Sharepoint, they open without any issues

Iron Contributor

@Christopher Bryan Would love to see a transfer to voicemail option for the receptionists. This is a large gap for our clients.

Brass Contributor

@Fred Franks & @Christopher Bryan A transfer to voicemail option is desperately needed for us. It's the only feature we need now for the go ahead to switch off our old VoIP to MS Teams.

Copper Contributor

The 200 channel limit per Team is truly hurting collaboration for a customer/project based structure... This limit has to be lifted. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18635230-channel-limit-increas...

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