February may be the shortest month of the year, but we were still able to bring plenty of new functionality to Microsoft Teams! From the new Outlook integrated experience to enhanced compliance controls, we are constantly improving to help people do their best work. Read on to learn about everything that is new to Teams in February.
New Teams & Outlook integrated experience
Teams is the hub for getting work done with your team—but we know that is not the only way people communicate. We have built this new integration between Outlook and Teams to make it easy to collaborate no matter where the conversation is taking place. The user can now move a Teams conversation from Teams to Outlook by clicking on the more options ("...") icon in a conversation. And rolling out in March, users will be able to move an email conversation form Outlook, including attachments, into a Teams chat or channel conversation by clicking on the ‘’Share to Teams’’ in Outlook. Learn more here.
What’s New: Chat & Collaboration
Get in touch with the right people with targeted communication
What do you do when you need to get an important message across to all cashiers in a store, or all managers in a warehouse? Targeted communication allows team members to message everyone assigned to a specific tag at the same time; simply @mention the tag name in a post. Using tags, team owners can organize users based on a common attribute, like a role, project, or location. Admins can control who can add tags and how tags are used across your organization in the Microsoft Teams admin center. Learn more here.
Automatic creation of an org-wide team
Streamline the process of bringing everyone together in your small to medium-sized business. All new tenants with 5000 users or fewer will start with an org-wide team. Learn more about org-wide teams and related best practices here.
New Files Experience in Teams powered by SharePoint rolled out worldwide! The Teams file experience is powered by SharePoint, and we are happy to share that the new file experience in Teams has now rolled out to 100% of worldwide tenants! This new experience in the File tab of a channel includes the ability to sync files to your computer (PC or Mac), see rich previews across 320+ file types, create views and work with metadata, see document life-cycle signals, review on-hover file cards, pin files to the top, take actions like check in and check out, and much more. See more of the experience here.
What’s New: Calling & Meetings
Store recordings in-region storage when Stream is not available in Go Local Teams meeting recordings are stored in Microsoft Stream cloud storage. Tenant administrators have an option to go to the admin center to turn ON/OFF “Allow cloud recording” setting for Teams meetings. Cloud recordings are currently not allowed/enabled for customers where Stream service is not available in the corresponding Go Local region. We are going to change the existing behavior by enabling “Allow cloud recording” and turning it ON by default. This change will store the recordings in the respective in-region data center. Learn more here.
What’s New: IT Admins Manage your App Catalog in the Teams Admin Center Confidently manage apps from the Microsoft Teams admin center. The Manage apps page provides administrators with a view into all available apps in the tenant and includes information to help them decide which apps to enabled for their organization. Additionally, the app catalog allows administrators to streamline the process of testing and distributing line-of-business applications. Learn more here.
What’s New: Security & Compliance Legal hold for Teams private channels messages Meet legal requirements by preserving information in Teams. Legal hold now supports the preservation of private channel messages. Learn more here.
Communication Compliance Minimize communication risks in your organization. Communication Compliance helps administrators detect, capture, and take remediation actions for inappropriate messages. Learn more here.
What’s New: GCC, GCC High, & DOD Phone System Additions for GCC There were several additions to These features are available to GCC customers. This includes (1) Teams users can screen share to Skype for Business users, (2) Callers can transfer directly to voicemail, (3) Caller ID for Teams users (AAD) (4) Chrome browser users can send and receive video calls, and (5) use the powerbar slash command to make PSTN calls.
What’s New: Apps & Workflows Enhanced Power BI Tab for Teams We’re excited to announce the new Power BI tab for Microsoft Teams. The new tab adds support for reports in the new workspace experiences, reports in Power BI apps, and paginated reports.
When the tab is added to your channels and chats, it’s easier for everyone to find and track the data they need to achieve their objectives. It’s also a great way to manage change in your organization. As new people join a team, the data they need is right there and ready for them to use
Pin your apps to the left-hand rail for easy access
Access to your favorite apps just got easier. You are now able to pin personal apps to the left-hand rail (also known as the Teams app bar). Simply find the app, right-click the app icon, and select “pin”. Even after you navigate away, the app icon will remain so you can easily return to it. Remember, you can also pin apps to relevant channels or chats for easy access as well!
The Teams Admin can also create group policies so certain apps appear on everyone’s Teams app bar. Learn more about Admin app pinning here.
What’s New: Education Introducing Microsoft Teams QBot! QBot is a solution designed for classroom teaching scenarios which allow teachers, tutors and students to intelligently answer each other's questions within the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform. It leverages the power of Azure Cognitive Services, in particular QnA Maker to achieve this.
Once the app is deployed to a Team, a student can ask a question on the channel by @tagging QBot. QBot will respond with the correct answer or tag a group of demonstrators allowing them to collaborate on a response. Accepted answers are subsequently used to train Qbot for future questions.
See a quick, animated demo of the various app scenarios here.
And More...
The Intrazone podcast episode: “An API for Teamwork”
Check out this recent episode of The Intrazone, “An API for Teamwork”, hosted by Microsoft’s Mark Kashman (@mkashman) and Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000). In this episode, Mark and Chris uncover the power and capabilities of Microsoft Teams as a platform while chatting with experts inside and outside of Microsoft. You’ll hear all about bots, tabs and connectors – the basis of what and how to approach extending the Microsoft Teams platform offering.
Can we now show Power BI reports without the end user have a Power BI Pro or E5 license? Would be great to show reports to end users even when they have an E3 license only.
please name the client version. These messages produce a lot of requests because the functions have not reached the customer. Remember, our customers are not developers!
Any idea when metadata modification on the Files tab will become possible? I don’t get why this was not rolled out with the SharePoint look and feel into Teams? Also, not able to start any Flow from within the Files tab. Loving the rest though!
We also do not see Share to Teams from Outlook (the other way around we do see). Plus, the link mentioned in the piece above on Share to Teams from Outlook leads to explanation on sharing from Outlook to Teams, not from Teams to Outlook :) Really looking forward to this function!
@Marissa Salazar per the above, can you comment on the lack of the Outlook to Teams capability that is labeled 'Available Now' in your article? Thanks!
I agree with other posters about availability notice. Our tenant doesn't have any of the Outlook integration stuff yet nor do we have the new Chat UI changes announced in note MC196069 (Office 365 admin center Message Center) originally published Nov 18th, 2019 which was updated Jan 8, 2020 saying rollout will be completed by mid-February.
The Office 365 Roadmap for the Outlook Integration feature mentioned in this Blog post (Feature ID 57389) hasn't been updated since 1/31/2020, still says "In Development" and is listed for Q1-2020.
It would be really great if the official information channels agreed with each other and would help us know when things are actually coming.
I would like one important feature for PowerApps usability: Persistent Tabs.
Currently, a PowerApps tab does not retain its contents - as soon as you navigate elsewhere, its contents are destroyed. In other words, it is not persistent.
It is very common to have to consult information elsewhere before continuing to work on some content. In the current model, having to consult elsewhere in the hub, then going back to a pinned PowerApps Tab, means reloading it from scratch, which takes time and bandwidth.
If the PowerApps Tab was persistent, it would maintain its state, just like a web browser tab. The user would be able to go elsewhere to consult information, then come back to the PowerApps Tab, and keep working merrily.
It will likely need a reload button for the user to force a refresh, like reloading a browser page, and the "Persistent" toggle would be changeable after pinning the tab.
Please make "Persistent Tabs" for PowerApps a reality!
"New Files Experience" - 320+ file previews are nice, but without the information panel to the right (like Sharepoint), one cannot preview Microsoft Office documents.
Sharepoint's Information panel preview needs usability improvements: the height of preview panel cannot be increased, limiting its use to preview data.
With the information panel, the user would be able to manage custom sharepoint column values and retention labels as well.
@Tiago Freire This has been a problem with "working" out of Teams for some time with all Tabs IMO. If they can get persistence in tabs somehow that would really help with staying and working in the Tool.
The problem will be performance most likely with the number of tabs etc. But one could probably have the Last 4 tabs you use and a timeout of 5-10 minutes on them at a minimum would drastically help, this would keep memory clean on tabs you just visit and move on etc. But def. would be a pretty hard problem to get right and not tax the system unless you could implement some kind of working "suspend" tab type of use case similar to mobile devices iOS etc. utilize.
To those not yet seeing "Share to Teams" in your tenant, this part of the experience will be rolling out in March 2020. The "Share to Outlook" experience from Teams, however, should be available and accessible in all tenants! Apologies for the confusion.
@Chris Webb@Marissa Salazar Yes, tab persistence is sibling to the web browser's tab management problem in terms of resources. I think that if they automatically "freeze" (stops processing) and "thaw" (resume processing), but preserve state, would already be better than a full reload, which is the current behavior - even if it means PowerApps "OnTimer" automatic events stop running when the tab is not on the foreground. If at least some tabs can be kept running, contingent on tab default settings, but subject to being overridden by available memory, plugged/charging or on battery, and Teams being on foreground/background, it could provide for a much better experience.
Great news, that the SharePoint files experience did come to Teams! Good job!
Unfortunately it's missing two crucial features:
1. "Share" => it's not possible to share a file from within the Files tab within Teams. Fun fact is, that it is possible when you open up SharePoint.
2. file size => the file size column is missing. This is really annoying I believe - especially in metered connection use cases
And, Microsoft Teams Product Group, please do me a favor: Make it possible again to switch to a teams channel list after using the /goto feature! Due to the fact, that the left navigation structure is not reflecting the search result (a teams general channel) it is really hard to switch into another channel of that team.
I support @Daniel Vollmer 's request about fixing Teams search. Once you have a search result, you can't navigate to the chat/team that it comes from. If you've found something that's more than a few weeks old, you may have to scroll for minutes to get back to the point in a thread where the result is located.
Likewise when you pin a channel, you can't get to the Team directly. I am a member of over 60 teams, most of which i keep hidden. Navigation is shocking.
I am not seeing any of these features. I am running the monthly targeted channel version 2002 (Build 1257.20242). Where do I go to install/activate them?
The only thing I see in what's new is pinning apps.
@Matt_IT Not a typo. Multiple thats are used for sentence clarity. You can also write "He said that that that that that man used is wrong." - which is a meaningful sentence.
@t-e-a-m-p-l-a-y-e-r Microsoft has repeatedly said that it is working towards this in stages, beginning with fast tenant switching. This point has been made as an admin response in the UserVoice page you linked.
@Marissa Salazar If you create a Link in a SharePoint Document Library (analagous to a URL shortcut file on your Windows desktop) as described here, then the Link will not work when viewed from inside Teams. (NB we fail to get SharePoint experience also in being unable to create these links inside Teams)
If you click the Link inside SharePoint, the web resource opens as expected. If you click the same link from the same doclib inside Teams, then you get an error "Hmmm... looks like this file doesn't have a preview we can show you." ( This site doesn't allow me to attach a screenshot - calling it invalid HTML despite having an image attach feature!)
I just updated my Teams to the newest version and have lost access to video chats and the GIF button. How can I restore these features? We use the video conferencing daily for work! Please help.
@Amanda_R Check with your organisation's Office365 administrator to see if they have been turned off. GIFs and other features can be turned off at the team level by Owners in the Team settings. Also if you don't have a webcam connected then it may be that you've lost video chat access. If all else fails, raise a support ticket with Microsoft.