What’s New in Microsoft Teams | June 2020
Published Jun 30 2020 08:00 AM 170K Views

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve to be the hub for teamwork and we're excited to share new functionality that helps people do their best work. We have new meetings, calling, devices, chat and collaboration, IT admin, and industry features this month! Check out our new capabilities below.

 

What’s New: Meetings, Calling, & Devices

We are transforming the meetings experience in Teams to include new features, settings, and devices to create a better experience, allowing you to get the most out of your meetings and achieve more together.

 

Large gallery view
Being able to see all of your colleagues’ faces at the same time makes a big difference in engagement and connection. Coming to preview this month with general availability coming soon, large gallery view expands the Teams grid view to 7×7, which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen.

 

Large gallery view in Microsoft Teams meetings showing 49 participants at once on a single screen.Large gallery view in Microsoft Teams meetings showing 49 participants at once on a single screen.

Virtual Breakout Rooms
Announced earlier this month, Breakout Rooms allow meeting organizers to split their Teams meeting participants into small groups to assist ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions. Teams facilitates this by assigning participants into a requested number of rooms—whether automatically directing people or prompting them to join. Organizers can jump in between meetings on their own—or when requested by a participant—, provide announcements to the individual rooms, and recall everyone back to the meeting at any time. Any collaboration and coauthoring done during the breakout can be shared back to the larger meeting once everyone is back together. Breakout Rooms will be delivered later this calendar year.

 

Multi-Window for Meetings & Calling
Multi-window experiences are coming to Teams meetings and calling. You will have the ability to pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow. These experiences can be turned on directly within Teams for PC and Mac clients.

Multi-window capability coming to Microsoft Teams meetings and calling.Multi-window capability coming to Microsoft Teams meetings and calling.

 

Teams meeting attendee limit increases to 300 participants
To help meet rapidly changing communication and meeting needs, we are increasing the maximum number of participants allowed in a Teams meeting to 300. This is generally available today.

 

New experience for launching instant channel meetings
Meet Now buttons in Teams channels will have a new home. You will soon find them in the Channel header where you can easily find and launch a channel meeting.

Meet Now buttons can now be found on the right side of a Channel header in Microsoft Teams.Meet Now buttons can now be found on the right side of a Channel header in Microsoft Teams.

 

PSTN participant phone numbers masked from external users
For customers with Audio Conferencing enabled for Teams meetings, PSTN participants’ phone numbers will be masked to all users who have joined from outside of your organization. This feature is rolling out soon for PC, Mac, web, and mobile clients.

PSTN participant phone numbers are masked with asterisks to users outside of your organization.PSTN participant phone numbers are masked with asterisks to users outside of your organization.

 

Safe Transfer
You will now be able to transfer a call safely to any other user in your organization. Safely means that if the target user does not answer the call, it will ring back to the transferrer. The person transferring the call must be a Teams user. The person the call is being transferred to must be either a Teams or Skype for Business user in the same tenant or in a federated tenant. This is used commonly used by reception, administrators, operators, and anyone who might be delegate for another user.

 

New Session Border Controllers (SBC) certified for use with Microsoft Teams Calling
The popularity of Direct Routing to connect PSTN services to Teams has been amazing. One of the key ingredients are Session Border Controllers. Customers have always asked for more certified SBC options as part of their Direct Routing deployment. We are excited that Cisco and Avaya will join our certification list. To learn more about Direct Routing deployment and certified Session Border Controllers, please read our documentation.

 

Bose announces new Microsoft Teams peripheral
We welcome Bose to the Teams peripheral family with the addition of Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 UC, now certified for Microsoft Teams! Bose’s new over-the-ear headphones not only lets users enjoy their meetings without distractions but also allows them to have a high-quality meeting experience whether you are at home, outside, or at work. With a USB Bluetooth adaptor and a Teams Button that lets users launch Teams to join meetings or check voice mails, NC700UC Teams certified headphones allow users to have reliable and instantaneous connection to Teams. Bose’s new Teams certified headphones will become available in August, 2020. You can learn more here

Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 UCBose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 UC

 

New capabilities on Microsoft Teams phones
This month, we are excited to release new features and capabilities on Microsoft Teams phones including People app and raise hands to improve parity with your Teams desktop experience.

 

People app to easily organize your contacts by creating and managing contact groups.

The People app on Microsoft Teams phones shows contacts in an organized way.The People app on Microsoft Teams phones shows contacts in an organized way.

 

Live captions to see real time captions in meetings (Live Captions is currently a preview feature in Microsoft Teams and available in English (US) for now).


Raise hand to let people know you want to contribute without interrupting the conversation.


Lock/Unlock with your PC to enable a coordinated and seamless lock and unlock experience between your Teams phone and your PC. To learn more about how to set up this feature, click here

The lock and unlock experience between your Teams phone and your PC.The lock and unlock experience between your Teams phone and your PC.


One click call transfer so you can easily transfer your calls to your frequent contacts with a single touch.


Teams and Skype interoperability – Last month, we announced this capability on Teams; by end of June, users will be able to make and receive audio and video calls from Skype for Consumer (SFC) through Microsoft Teams phones

 

New Teams features available for Surface Hub
The latest Surface Hub app update 0.2020.13201.0, is now available through the Windows Store. This update delivers several highly requested features to the Teams experience on Surface Hub.

  • 3x3 gallery view: view up to nine meeting participants simultaneously in full screen mode,
    in the new 3x3 video grid
  • External user search: Through the “Meet Now” feature on Surface Hub, you can now search and initiate 1:1 calls with federated Teams or Skype for Business users
  • Incoming PSTN calls: in addition to making outgoing PSTN calls through Teams, Surface Hub you can now receive incoming PSTN calls

This update is available to both Surface Hub and Surface Hub 2S.

 

Scheduled meetings coming to the free version of Teams
Teams free users can now schedule meetings and send out invitations in advance! You will have the option of either copying the meeting link to send or you can send the meeting invite via your Outlook or Google calendar. Currently, there is no time limit on meetings in the free version of Teams.

Microsoft Teams free users can schedule meetings and send out invitations via your Outlook calendar.Microsoft Teams free users can schedule meetings and send out invitations via your Outlook calendar.

 

 

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

We added new chat and collaboration capabilities to keep teams connected at all times, no matter where they're working from. 

 

Teams Mobile On-Demand Chat Translation
Inline message translation ensures that everyone has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. On-Demand Chat Translation has already been available on desktop and web, and now will be available on iOS.

 

Priority notifications
Originally announced in June 2019, priority notifications for Microsoft Teams grants you the ability to continually send notifications that repeat every two minutes for up to 20 minutes on all messages marked as urgent. Priority notifications had been made available as a promotion to all Teams customers* until the second half of 2020.


Effective immediately, we have ended this promotion and made priority notifications available to all Teams customers* as a basic capability. Users will now be able to send and receive unlimited urgent messages with priority notification. Learn more about managing priority notifications.


*Priority notifications are not currently available for GCC, GCC High, or DoD customers, however this is on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap for next month.

Priority notifications can be found in the message actions tray.Priority notifications can be found in the message actions tray.

 

Pulse Survey Templates
During this time, many companies are working remotely and need to collect information from their employee base while planning for their eventual return to the office. We have designed several Microsoft Forms templates for sentiment, employee issues, challenges, and health status surveys and more. These surveys can then be deployed via Teams channels. Learn more here. To get started, click here.

 

 

What’s New: IT Admin
The Teams Power Shell improvements will enhance IT admins experience with significant performance and resilience improvements in the modules and simplified access to their required Cmdlets with improved clarity on the Cmdlets scope.

 

Teams Power Shell (PS) modules improvements

Moving Teams Beta module to production gallery
Centralize all the Teams management modules in the same production module. Moving the Beta module that hosted on PostTestGallery into the same Team Power Shell production module on PSGallery, (PSGallery is the standard home for all Teams management Cmdlets in Power Shell). The Team Beta module will be tagged with “Preview” name. This improvement provides a simplified IT admin experience through:

  • Easier access to required Cmdlets, when bringing the module into one common place. For example, ‘manage Private Channels’ in Teams, is a required Cmdlets that was resided in a Teams beta module and is moved to be handy in the production gallery.
  • Faster time to GA - The Cmdlets are more discoverable and treated with the full processes that go into a Public Preview release.


Refined technical documentation set
Based on IT Admins’ feedback we have refreshed and updated all Teams Power Shell documentation, making it easier to discover what’s in production vs. preview and shipping release notes for each release.


For more information please link to the Teams Power Shell overview page.

 

 

Developer & Platform
We are announcing incoming webhooks for adaptive cards in Teams to continue to provide a rich canvas for developers to build, engage, and transform workflows.


Incoming Webhooks for Adaptive Cards
We are excited to announce that incoming webhooks in Teams now support Adaptive Cards and is generally available! Developers will now be able to take advantage of the rich and flexible capabilities within Adaptive Cards to send content via incoming webhooks in Teams from their web service. This feature has been one of the most desired asks in UserVoice by our Teams developer community over the past two years, and we are excited to finally deliver this. For more details, please see our technical blog post here.

Incoming webhooks in Microsoft Teams now support Adaptive Cards.Incoming webhooks in Microsoft Teams now support Adaptive Cards.

 

 

Teams for Education
We continue to implement new ways for Teams to support student engagement and professional development.


Class Insights
Class Insights enables educators to see and understand student engagement using intelligent data analytics. You can see grades and track engagement in meetings, communications and assignments from the whole class or an individual student. Generally available, with a new and improved dashboard to drive student outcomes will be coming in the fall.

Class Insights dashboard in Microsoft Teams allows educators to use intelligent data analytics to understand student engagement.Class Insights dashboard in Microsoft Teams allows educators to use intelligent data analytics to understand student engagement.

 

To see the latest 20+ updates for Teams for Education check out aka.ms/TeamsUpdatesJune2020. And if you’re looking to test what it’s like to use Teams as a student or educator, try out the new click-through demos here aka.ms/edu-interactive-demos.

 

 

Teams for US Government
We are here to support US Government clouds. Here are the new capabilities for GCC customers.


Live captions in Teams meetings
This enables meeting participants to view live captions during a Teams meeting. Supported spoken languages in this release is English (EN-US). This is currently available for GCC customers on desktop and does not yet include GCC High and DoD environments.

 

Enable organizers to change lobby settings for PSTN meeting participants
Any user who schedules a Microsoft Teams meeting will now see a separate setting to control the lobby for PSTN participants in the Meeting Options page of a given meeting. This will be available for GCC customers.

 

Announce when PSTN participants join/leave the meeting
Any user who schedules a Teams meeting will now see a new setting in Meeting Options page of a meeting to control the announcement sound when a PSTN/dial-in participant joins or leaves the meeting. This will be available for GCC customers.

 

Shifts in Teams now available for GCC customers
Shifts in Microsoft Teams will enable GCC customers to transform schedule management for their Firstline Workforce. Shifts in Microsoft Teams has reached compliance with GCC Requirement Guidelines and has started a tenant by tenant roll out to Office 365 Government GCC.
*Please note we're admitting tenants to the product roll-out list and monitoring roll outs with an anticipated general GCC availability 2 months out. Admins should work with Microsoft to get their tenant an early spot in line.

Shifts calendar view on desktop (left) and Shifts daily view for mobile (right).Shifts calendar view on desktop (left) and Shifts daily view for mobile (right).

 

 

 

33 Comments
Steel Contributor

Awesome Guys

Love the Multi-Window AND the Powershell consolidation!

Brass Contributor

Great updates! Is there any news on when being able to assign a Direct Routing number via the Teams Admin Centre will be possible? Thanks.

Brass Contributor

Hi, looks very good.

 

How can have my meeting controls on the top of the window like the second picture? I still have those controls floating at the bottom.

 

Kind regards,

Mark

 

 

Silver Contributor

Amazing effort, well done!

Brass Contributor

Very cool. Thanks for the effort!

Brass Contributor

We are using Logitech Teams Room systems, when will we have the 3 x 3 and the 7 x 7 available?

Brass Contributor

The most important release in this post is the....   NEW CONVERSATION button!!!

NewConversationButtonInTeams.png

Brass Contributor

What’s New in June, in 15 minutes it will be July and my tenant doesn’t have 80% of the features mentioned!  I’m a Teams fan but the constant release dates that don’t happen gets frustrating.

Copper Contributor

Parabéns Microsoft:double_exclamation_mark:

Brass Contributor

Very excited to start using and training our educators on these updates!

Copper Contributor

I would LOVE the ability to choose the view for the rest of the participants. The equivalent of the "spotlight" feature in zoom. 

Brass Contributor

We need to be able to control this large gallery view : in some meetings (probably most of them) I do not want to see 49 faces, I want to see the speaker, is there a way to toggle between gallery view and speaker view ?

Brass Contributor

In all Screen capture there is this "New Conversation" button but still not announced and still not available, make this available now, why are you waiting ?

Awesome work! Thanks for Sharing with the Community :cool:

Iron Contributor

It's July, I'm setup for Targeted release, and I don't see most of what's included as "New for June".  Any updates on when we'll see all this wonderful functionality please?

Copper Contributor

Great news! 

Steel Contributor

What's not in Microsoft Teams yet - let's have a look through the top requests from UserVoice, all of which have over 10,000 votes, and some of which are over three years old.

 

  • Show video for all people in a video meeting - New - Good progress with the 7x7 view covering most use cases
  • Multiple accounts - Working on it- Over 3 years old, "working on it" for almost exactly 3 years.
  • Multi-window for chats and more - Partially implemented - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since August 2018. Chats now can be popped out, but not other views. Despite being only partially implemented, this ticket was marked as "complete" and feedback disabled. Votes from 20,000+ of your users for the "and more" part have effectively been dumped in the bin. Please resurrect this ticket.
  • Move a channel - On the backlog - Over 3 years old, "working on it" but then withdrawn.
  • Reply to specific message in chat - On the backlog - No response yet, but needs to avoid the specific UI mistakes that make threading in channels such a nightmare.
  • Include Office365 calendar - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since July 2018.
  • Compact mode - Under review - Over 3 years old, was "working on it" for most of that time, now rolled backwards to "under review", still no indication that you understand what is actually being requested. Now that more people are collaborating on real work from home using single small laptop screens, the enormous Teams UI is a burden. Very disappointing that this did not come in as part of the "separate window" updated.
  • Archive channels - On the Backlog - Over 3 years old, was "working on it" for 15 months, now on backlog.
  • View or export list of user who attended a meeting - New, partially done - Only available during a meeting, but nice to see a useful feature being made available so fast.
  • Breakout rooms - Working on it - New request rightly prioritised.
  • Memory footprint and performance - Working on it - Over 3 years old but some progress happening.
  • List users in channel - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since April 2017.
  • Delete private chats - On the backlog - Over 2 years old, apparently "finalising the design" but we've seen this before (see "Compact mode")
  • Allow custom emoji - On the backlog - Over 3 years old, if implemented absolutely needs a "don't show emojis" option for the receiver.
  • Move conversations - Working on it - Over 3 years old, "working on it" since October 2018.

Also, now that more of our work is coming in online, a proper fine-grained set of notification options is a higher priority than ever. That's been open for three years too.

Copper Contributor

Those are all lovely features but in today's world of home working and also sadly job losses it becomes more and more necessary for the meeting ownership or organizer to be transferable or have multiple organizers.

Awesome news.

 

the second link on Forms Pulse survey template seems broken. anyone can confirm ? https://c3web.trafficmanager.net/topic/4ebf181b-9a0d-4921-a477-5954e94cfa04 

 

thx for help :)

 

very nice updates and new "Reply" New conversation is a must !

Copper Contributor

Are the updates for teams already in the playstore. Version available does not accept personal email 

Copper Contributor

Buenas noticias, ampliación de capacidades esperadas.

Cuando estarán disponibles para todos los usuarios y app macOS

Silver Contributor

It's weird that you call it June 2020 and everything is coming sometimes later this year. I would prefer you to just share what is available now and maybe post future features in a separate post that i would ignore :)

Copper Contributor

M excited to see all my students together on the screen...7*7 wow!

 

N one more thing that students can't start the meeting unless teacher starts...great!

 

Chat disable in the absence of teacher is another much awaited feature!

Copper Contributor

Is 7x7 or AT LEAST 3x3 comming to ipad?

 

And to browsers? (one camera on google chrome is lame).

Iron Contributor

When are we going to get native notifications????? It's been an open feature request for almost 4 years now, and it's been in a "working on it" status for over 2 years. It can't be that hard!

Copper Contributor

When will the 3x3 be available on the Crestron Flex systems?

Copper Contributor

When are you going to decide to fix Native Notifications for Teams in MacOS? You have had a UserVoice bug report open on it for 2 years, with no movement or fixes for a relatively simple issue. The fact that you ignore it constantly is very disappointing and angering to corporate Mac users who miss notifications constantly because the non-native notifications are absolutely horrible and poorly implemented.

But no, go ahead and make sure and shove 49 people into a single meeting's video chat. That's what is important. Not notifying a whole host of computer users when they have a video chat. That's totally back burner stuff.

Copper Contributor

hi, i'm a college professor teaching a large class (starting in 3 weeks!) and I am very interested in the large gallery view.  What processor requirements will be needed to make this work?  (i.e., Zoom requires at least Intel i7 processor).

 

Also, any more info on Together view?  I would love to give either a try very soon!  thanks!

Iron Contributor

I have to agree with others.  I love these "what's new in..." blog posts, but I'd love to see just what is done rolling out vs. what is coming soon.  Especially since so many coming soon features end up getting delayed multiple times. Also, it seems you announce features that are coming soon, but don't follow up and re-announce those when they actually are done rolling out.  I have started creating scheduled To Do tasks to follow up on features that I'd like to communicate to my users once they are available to them, but it seems like I keep having to reschedule those to push them back month after month.  It's exhausting.  

Silver Contributor

I stopped doing that. So many messages, blog posts, all to create hype and make PR machine running, so subscribers won't run away. You can't keep up. Better use these tasks for actual work :) I just decided if i notice something new myself, then i can test it and announce to the users. This is the nature of cloud. They can't deploy it in one day to all customers with so many data centers, licensing types (GCC, DoD, etc.) and other limitations. So they can't tell their customers exact dates. Even when they think they can they run into some roadblocks, but they can't tell they failed, this is bad PR. So they just stay silent. Numbers of customers are growing, this becomes more and more cumbersome, support is getting worse, etc. Cloud is good as you can just use the apps and do not care about infra, but this works better when service providers are smaller or focus on one service and even then they can grow too big and then it becomes too complex with too many moving parts.

Copper Contributor

Confirmed @hadness the 2nd link is broken.

 

Screen Shot 2020-07-19 at 07.20.11.png

Copper Contributor

Please can we have more than 4 simultaneous video streams (2x2) on iPad and/or iOS in general.  PLEASE.

Iron Contributor

The Teams Education team just posted a what's new and coming soon blog.  Please adopt their review format at the end of posts like this.  It really makes things much more clear.

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/25-updates-for-microsoft-teams-for-education-f...

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