What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2019
Published Nov 04 2019 06:00 AM 464K Views
Microsoft

New innovations in Microsoft Teams enhance collaboration and business processes for all workers

 

Today at Ignite, we are announcing a ton of new capabilities in Teams to help customers in all industries work in new ways and better respond to the evolving needs of their business.

  1. Customize your Teams conversations and experience
  2. Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams
  3. Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings
  4. Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams
  5. Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries
  6. New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data
  7. Automate workflows, integrate custom apps and data insights within Teams using Power Platform
 

 

1. Customize your Teams conversations and experience

Private channels enable users to create channels within existing teams that can be viewed and accessed by only select members of that team. Users can create a private channel by selecting "Private" under the privacy settings of the new channel. Private channels are available starting this week and you can learn more here.

 

Multiwindow capability provides users the option to pop out chats, meetings, calls or documents into separate windows to help you streamline their workflow. Multiwindow capabilities will start rolling out early next year.

 

Teams client for Linux will support the main Teams capabilities like chats, meetings, calling as expected so people who use Linux client at work or educational institution can collaborate with others on Teams. Users will be able to install native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats. Teams client for Linux will start rolling out as a preview later this year.

 

New messaging extensions including Polls and Surveys will be available in Teams chat and channel conversations. Click on "…" at the bottom of the message compose box in a chat or channel to access these extensions and solicit instant feedback on shared items or questions. These will start rolling out later this year.

 

Pinned Channels allows users to keep important channels at the top of your teams list for easy access. This capability will be available later this year.

 

 

2. Easily manage conversations, tasks, and files from other Microsoft 365 apps within Teams

New integration between Outlook and Teams makes it easy to collaborate no matter where the conversation is taking place. The user can move an email conversation from Outlook, including attachments, into a Teams chat or channel conversation by clicking on the ‘’Share to Teams’’ in Outlook. They can also share a conversation from Teams to an Outlook email by clicking on the more options (‘’…’’) icon in a conversation. This will start rolling out early next year.  

 
Users will also get actionable missed activity emails which make it easy to stay on top of missed conversation in Teams. The missed activity emails show the latest replies from the conversation, and allow you to respond directly from within Outlook.
 

Tasks in Teams gives you a new unified view of your personal and assigned tasks within Teams. It consolidates your tasks across Microsoft To Do, Teams channels, Planner and Outlook. Users have smart views including tasks assigned to you, the priority as well as start or due date. Users can choose the view that works the best for them – list, boards, charts, schedules – to get things done. It will be available to users early next year.

 

The new Yammer app for Teams makes Yammer communities, conversations, and live events accessible right within Teams. IT admins and end users can also pin the app on the left navigation rail in Teams to have easy access to Yammer - helping everyone stay up to date with their communities and participate in organization-wide conversations. It will start rolling out early next year.

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3. Conduct more inclusive and effective meetings

Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available in Teams Meetings via the share tray. This gives teams an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to ideate and collaborate whether they are in the same room or working remotely.

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Live Captions in Teams Meetings makes meetings more inclusive, giving participants another way to follow along with the conversation, and addressing the needs of participants with different hearing abilities or language proficiencies. It will start rolling out as Preview in US English later this year with plans to expand to other languages in the future.

 

New presenter and attendee controls allow meeting organizers to pre-define presenter and attendee roles for meeting participants. Designated presenters will have full control over the meeting, whereas participants in “attendee” role won’t have ability to share content, take control, mute or remove other participants, admit people waiting in the lobby, or start/stop recordings. It will be available later this year.

 

Together with Citrix, we are optimizing the performance of Microsoft Teams Calling and Meetings for Citrix virtual environments allowing organizations to deliver a high-fidelity Microsoft Teams experience for an on-premises or Azure hosted virtual desktop or application. We expect this solution will become generally available to customers within the next 30 days.

 

Expanding the Cloud Video Interop (CVI) partnerships to include Cisco the newest partner to help customers use Teams meetings with Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices in the meeting rooms, starting in early CY 2020.

 

With support from industry vendors, Microsoft has pioneered a new approach that enables Microsoft Teams Rooms devices to connect to meeting services from other vendors via browser-based technologies. Microsoft is working with Cisco and Zoom to enable a direct guest join capability from the respective video conferencing devices to the video meeting service using the web app. This capability will be supported on a new generation of meeting room devices with embedded web technology. We plan to add support for other vendors over the course of time. These solutions are expected to be generally available in early 2020.

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Collaboration bars for Microsoft Teams are a new category of devices from our partners to convert small spaces into online meeting and collaboration spaces. These affordable, simple to install and easy to manage video conferencing solutions attach to your displays, TVs or touchscreens in minutes for high-quality video meetings. It enables experiences like one-touch & proximity join, content sharing and whiteboarding.

 

Poly with their Studio X Series and Yealink with VC210 are first two partners to launch their devices in early 2020.

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New Microsoft Teams speakerphones have a dedicated Teams button which gives users the ability to have a seamless interaction with Teams. The first speakerphone to be certified is available from Yealink CP900 today, which will soon be followed by additional speakerphones built for Teams from our other peripheral partners. Additionally, we are offering 20% off all phones and peripherals which are certified for Teams during Microsoft Ignite. To take advantage, just add the promo code MSIGNITE19 at checkout on office.com/teamsdevices between November 4th, 2019 to November 15th, 2019

 

New enterprise Phone System capabilities, such as emergency calling, call queue functionality, administrative control, Phone System for Government customers like GCC High and DoD, as well as advanced functionalities like music on hold, call delegation and voice mail management will be available by end of this year. Additionally, we also announced new ISV partner enterprise voice advancements like Contact Center and Compliance Recording that make Teams Phone System a great cloud phone system solution for enterprise customers. You can find more information in the Teams Calling blog.

 
Learn more about Microsoft Teams devices here.

 

4. Give your Firstline Workers easier access to Teams

SMS Sign-In gives Firstline Workers a low friction way to sign into Teams with their phone number and a one-time SMS passcode for authentication. It will be available as a public preview early next year.

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Off shift access is a new setting that can be enabled by IT administrators to provide a notification to Firstline Workers when they access the Teams app on their personal device outside payable hours. The users then need to provide consent to the notification before being able to access their app. It will start rolling out early next year.

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Global Sign-Out saves time and keeps Firstline Workers secure when they use shared devices at work by enabling them to sign-out at once from all the apps they use on their shift. This feature will initially be available as a public preview for Android devices early next year and in preview for iOS devices thereafter.

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Delegated User Management enables Firstline managers to manage user credentials and approve password reset requests via the My Staff portal. As a result, Firstline managers are empowered to unblock staff issues, reducing the burden of identity management on IT. It will be available as a public preview early next year.

 

Graph API enhancements provide two-way communication between a workforce management system of your choosing and Shifts to enable enterprise-scale configuration. And with new open source integration templates on GitHub, customers can integrate Teams with Kronos and JDA. JDA connectors are available now and Kronos coming later this month.

 

 

5. Enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries

Virtual Consults offers a simple way to schedule and conduct B2C virtual consultations via Microsoft Teams, such as healthcare patient consults, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Attendees can easily join the virtual consultation via their web browser or Teams mobile app. Teams has enabled virtual consults through its new external appointments functionality and is now in private preview.

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Patient Coordination in Teams enables healthcare professionals to streamline patient care. By entering patient information into Teams’ secure platform, physicians, nurses, and other care team members can centralize and digitize the information they need when communicating and collaborating around patients in various scenarios like patient rounding, multi-disciplinary team meetings, and discharge huddles. Patient Coordination in Teams supports enterprise-grade security and enables HIPAA compliance. It will be available in public preview soon.

 

 

6. New planning and administration tools to easily manage Teams and protect your data

Advisor for Teams assists IT admins in planning a successful Teams deployment for their organization, offering recommended plans and a collaboration space for the deployment team to streamline the roll out of all the Teams workloads, including messaging, meetings and calling workloads. This feature is currently in public preview.

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Microsoft Teams in Office 365 Business & Office 365 ProPlus semi-annual channel will streamline your Teams deployment with Office ProPlus. Starting on January 14th, 2020, Click-to-Run will install the Teams client for all PCs on the semi-annual channel, and the client will update itself regularly from that point onward. This will be a gradual rollout over several weeks, so not all existing installations will immediately get Teams added when Office is updated. 

 

New app catalog helps IT admins get the information they need to confidently enable apps from the Microsoft Teams admin center. The catalog provides administrators details such as name, description, certification status, publisher, and policy details for applications available in their Teams environment. The certification status within the catalog covers a 2-tiered program – Publisher self-attestation and a rigorous Microsoft 365 Certification. These programs ensure admins have full visibility into app’s security and compliance practices. This will start rolling out by end of this year.

App Catalog.JPG

 

Policy packages make it easier to assign policies and ensure your users have access to the Teams capabilities they need. IT Admins can assign a policy package, a collection of predefined policies and policy settings, to users who have similar roles in the organization. The first set of policies packages are available now and are designed for roles in the education space. We will continue to release more policy packages soon. Learn more here.

 

Policy assignment to security groups in PowerShell is also going to be available by end of this year.

 

Microsoft Teams Rooms in the Teams Admin Portal will allow the IT admins to manage the device inventory for your organization and do tasks such as assign configurations, restart devices, monitor and diagnose. This will start rolling out later this year.

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Managed Meeting Rooms is a new Microsoft offer for managing meeting rooms as a service.  This cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service ensures that Teams meeting rooms are secured, up to date, and proactively monitored for a great in-room experience. To date, we've been working with more than 100 customers to manage more than 1,500 meeting rooms. The private preview will open this experience to more of you! If you’re interested in participating in the private preview, you can register your interest here.

 

Safe Links in Microsoft Teams, powered by Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, now safeguards Teams messages from harmful links in real time. When a web address (URL) is shared in a private chat or channel conversation, Teams will perform a time-of-click verification of web addresses and alert users of any risk such as malware or viruses.

 

Other security and compliance capabilities that will be available by end of this year include support for messaging events such as deletion and edit within audit log search; the extension of information barriers policies to apply to files stored in a team’s SharePoint site; support for retention policies as short as one day within Teams retention policies; and the expansion of e-Discovery results to now include search results for keywords and the conversations around them.

 

 

7. Automate workflows, integrate custom apps and data insights within Teams using Power Platform

Power Apps creators can now publish their apps as Teams apps for easy use and access when working on Teams. Admins can also publish these custom apps directly to their company’s app library in Teams, making them more discoverable to users. New updates also improve the experience of adding these apps to Teams. It will start rolling out later this year.

 

Pinning an app created with Power Apps to Teams left rail will provide users easy access to frequently used apps in everyday use. It will be available to users later this year.

 

Teams-centric actions & triggers with Power Automate allows users to create new kinds of automated workflows within Teams. The user can create a trigger for specific actions when someone new joins their team, notifications within Teams when a certain keyword is mentioned, automatically set focused time and to save notes to OneNote. These will be available to users later this year.

 

Power BI interactive cards in Teams chat experience will help users quickly find and take actions on their data. It will start rolling out early next year.

 

We are committed to delivering rich and engaging experiences that help our customers like L’Oreal, Telstra, Special Olympics, St. Lukes and Berkshire to transform their work culture and business processes with Teams.

 

Get guidance and tools to help you with the adoption of Teams at our Microsoft Adoption hub. Thank you for helping shape Teams through your feedback in our UserVoice forum.  We are always listening and welcome your comments.

 

145 Comments
Steel Contributor

@Bryce McMillan If I have a large project, that project would be in Teams. If I have multiple outside people (vendors) in that project I would want them in private channels, isolated from other vendors. Maybe a design channel, a fabrication channel, a logistics channel, etc. All of my employees on the project would be in the team, and each would be in 1 or more private channels depending on how much cross functionality they have, but each vendor/consultant as a guest would be locked into their private channel only.

 

Except they are also in the General Channel as one big happy family under the current design.

 

And no. Multiple teams doesn't work well. Internal people have to manage 5 teams for one project vs 1 team with 5 channels (or more). And then there are the 5 Power BI workspaces that get created with the 5 separate teams, and the 5 Outlook Groups that show up. and if someone changes divisions, they have to be removed from multiple teams per project vs just one team and all the channels.

 

That is off the top of my head. We tried the multiple team approach and abandoned it quickly and stuck with emails. We are evaluating the current setup and trying to decide is the collaboration worth the exposure of other parties on a project through the General Channel. It isn't a slam dunk answer, and may even be a decision made on a project by project basis.

Brass Contributor
As Ed outlines, pretty common situation when you work with people outside of your org
Silver Contributor

While i understand what Ed means and his use case, when i heard "Private Channels" i only thought about a secret place for some members of a team to talk privately. I didn't thought about external users, so i guess Microsoft design aligns with the name. And in your case you need some "User Isolation" ("wormholing") feature to let a particular user to access only set channels. Btw, i suppose Barriers also doesn't work? I don't remember exactly, maybe it was only to not let someone to talk to someone and maybe team/channel contents is still accessible.

Iron Contributor

@Bryce McMillan 

Two important chat limitations are relevant:

1. Retention policies. It's hard to govern chats in the same way as Teams
2. Guest users on Chat don't have access to file sharing. You have to manually create a shared storage for them, but you lose the ability to casually share content inline
Iron Contributor
@Ed Hansberry Thanks Ed, this explanation definitely helps the rest of us to understand the various ways in which others use and experience Teams.
Iron Contributor
@Mike Williams Thanks Mike, I wasn't aware of the second point as we haven't had a lot of guest use in our tenant. At least not a lot that we've actively discussed and received feedback on :)
Copper Contributor

That is a very robust roll out of new features. I'm very excited.

 

Brass Contributor

What Private Channels need is Access Based Enumeration. You should only see what you have rights to.

 

Team ABE for Private Channels, I'll start a vote on User Voice.

Copper Contributor

Private Channels availability is a great news. However, effective adoption would mean relocating exisiting conversation (and documents) from other Teams. Would be nice having support from the Teams App for this. 

Brass Contributor

The implementation of "Private channels" is based on the creation of a whole new SharePoint site, where the SharePoint access groups are used to control who can see it. That explains why it is not possible to convert a channel back and forth between private and not private.

I don't understand why Microsoft did not just use access control on the folder that corresponds to the channel on the same site as the rest of the channels. Weird decision which complicates things a lot.

 

/Leif

Iron Contributor

@Leif Frederiksen Access control is not used because then any Team Owner could break into a private channel.

Copper Contributor

I suspect Microsoft will eventually allow existing channels to be converted into private channels.

Copper Contributor

Awesome update.

Copper Contributor

The CP900 looked nice.  <<we are offering 20% off all phones and peripherals which are certified for Teams>>  Except you are not - <<That coupon can only be used on selected products. none of the allowed products are in your shopping cart. (MSIGNITE19)>>  I think I am still within the timeframe.

@David Phillips @Jeffrey Allen I am sure I read that the Guest Join Access via a WebRTC experience will come to the Surface Hub, but not confirmed timeframe as yet.

Brass Contributor

Great news!

Silver Contributor

@Karan Nigam, will Microsoft be adding the ability to schedule meetings in Private channels?

Copper Contributor

Please, just give ut the possibility to have multi tenant connection in the Teams client, where you can just jump between them without any hassle. I really don't care about the other stuff you present here, as long as that's not an option.

Brass Contributor

Nice, and more,


- I hope to use the live captions in Japanese language,
- I hope to translate the live captions,
- I hope to search keyword from the live captions dueling / after the meeting,
- I hope to run the workflow of Power Automate, when specific words speech, 

 

Iron Contributor

@Karan Nigam there appears to be a bug in Private Channels feature that prevents deletion of a Private Channel if retention policies are in place.

Copper Contributor
A desktop client for Linux!! Yes! Finally! Wonderful news!! Thank you so much!
Steel Contributor

@Tony_Harris Just saw the Linux client on the roadmap with an expected Dec 2019 delivery date. Very soon!

Iron Contributor

Well done Microsoft! It was a brave strategic move to focus your efforts on Teams and shift away from Skype for Business. These improvements and the pace of innovation is fantastic.

Copper Contributor

Hi
Teams is great, but currently I'm missing the feature of separating chat from other activities within teams. I learned, you are planning to change that and you will allow to pop out chat windows.

However, this will require 3 extra clicks (select chat, settings pop-out) - instead it would be better if you would allow to drag out chat specific window to a separate window this will save me quite a lot of extra clicks.

Eventually, shortcut key binding would be a solution too - thanks.

Iron Contributor

Perhaps it worth mentioning this and suggesting a feature on User voice? https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/

Copper Contributor

I am worried that the automated installation of Teams with Office 365 ProPlus will wreak havoc when a user has been assigned an Office 365 ProPlus license, but no E-Mail and therefore no license for Teams. We are servicing large school tenants where students have private, unmanaged devices. There should be a way to avoid Teams to auto start if the user lacks a Teams license.

Copper Contributor

As an enterprise users, I’d like to see a date by which we will see these new features. A statement like ‘we are rolling it out’ pretry lame. We’ve lives and not in the business of checking if a feature rolled out. . 

Brass Contributor

Good positive news! Thanks

Copper Contributor

The top requested feature in user voice is over 2 years old and still unannounced:

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17750851-i-want-to-use-multipl...

 

What's it going to take?

Silver Contributor

@Karan Nigam, I agree with @JustinDynamicD, when is the top requested feature going to roll out?

Brass Contributor

@JustinDynamicD 

 

The top requested feature was private channels, last time I checked it had over 23,444 votes on September 5th, so this is now the new "top requested feature"

 

Iron Contributor

@JustinDynamicD, Microsoft's July notes on that topic stated that "Full multi-tenant, multi-user support will be added after fast tenant switching." That switching work has only just started rolling out, so progress to the final goal is showing.

Parts of this item are already rolling out. It’s a work in progress. Multi login support for mobile has rolled out as fast tenant switching has just hit desktop clients.  

You can add multiple accounts on your iPhone and Android. The account switching experience is super fast and we have been getting good feedback. We have released the feature around August and have a lot of users using it. 

Spoiler
Account switching used to work on Android. Broken at the moment. Can't switch at all.  Have reported it as an issue via the app 
Copper Contributor

I'm going to be a little picky/rude here, but to restate the title of the request:

 

"I want to use multiple Teams accounts at the same time"

(emphasis mine)

Adding multiple accounts to android and iPhone then "switching" may have gotten faster, but it's not the ask.  It never was (you can read comments where people expressed this concern when we were told it was the first goal). The ask is that users don't want to switch at all but rather have simultaneous access as needed.  Best example I can give would be a messaging classic: Outlook. You can open multiple mailboxes simultaneously within a single profile easily and then see mail notifications from all mailboxes simultaneously.

The pain-point is visibility.  When you switch, your other presence is effectively muted: you don't get messages, notifications, anything.  Switching has certainly sped things up ... but it's a band-aid on the root of the issue.  For consulting it's especially painful: switching accounts/orgs to focus on Client A makes you completely unreachable by Client B until one switches back.

Iron Contributor
For JustinDynamicD I have clicked on the kudos button a hundred times ...

@JustinDynamicD - No need to think you are rude at all. We are building products for you and are always excited to hear from you. We understand the need for having an unified view. While we know thats important, we are prioritizing the ability to add accounts first and access them separately. Once we cross this hurdle, we will start thinking about the unified view. 

@Graham Walsh - We will take a look at the issue and try to get back as soon as we can. 

Copper Contributor

And yet, with all this, still no ability to print a channel or consolidate a channel discussion into a single usable format for review. I have a channel with over 300 entries and to track the items in the channel that we've resolved is a nightmare. Scrolling is horrible as well. These are great updates, but they seem rather esoteric compared to the every day usage updates that could have been added.

You shouldn’t be using chat to manage request tracking. That’s why they make support systems and or bots that link to actual request tracking applications so you don’t manage it in an open chat stream. 

Not to say there isn’t room for improvement but definitely need to take the tracking part out of chat and into another method of tracking and use the chat for communication / collab part of the process.   

Brass Contributor

When released worldwide, will closed captioning require audio to be processed in a US data center, or will the tenant's local data center support the functionality?

Brass Contributor

Really not enjoying the UI changes to Teams that have just landed.  Renaming conversations 'Posts' now makes it sound social-media related, rather than actual work, a message we were really having to put a lot of effort into.  

 

Reducing the space for Tabs now makes them harder too view. 

 

But, the worst change is, we can no longer have a conversations (or now write posts) about a files in a document library that we've linked in from a different sharepoint site.  This was an absolute saviour for us as people were reluctant to use Teams as they already had sharepoint sites set up for their needs. Some would be persuaded to move their documents but not many.  (classic sites with subsite structure so can't upgrade them).  

 

Brass Contributor

@Victoria Wells 

 

Victoria, the rename of conversations to posts is news to me, I missed that.

 

We're still seeing conversations.

 

Is this something that just happened to you?

 

 

Brass Contributor

@TheDigDC 

this also happened to me. just identified it today morning.

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Brass Contributor

@Patrick Riedl 

 

There's an emoji with teeth, in a straight line, I use it to signify awkwardness, or anxiety, or impending doom, sometimes combined, I call it the "Oh sh*t" Emoji, we don't have that one in teams..

 

I might request it on User Voice...

Brass Contributor

Bosh.

 
 
 

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Brass Contributor

Acutally, even worse is another issue we've found with the Files section. When clicking on a file, you used to have the options 'edit in Teams', then desktop, then browser version.  Edit in Teams option went last week (we didn't like that either) as the conversations pane is now different. But, what we didn't realise is upon clicking that file in Teams, we are now straight into edit mode. So, 1. it took absolutely ages to load a PowerPoint and 2, we were accidentally editing it straight away. Again, having this kind of read only view was actually a real selling point with our users

Copper Contributor

I concur with @Victoria Wells . We need a way to revert the default view to view mode. Having documents open directly into edit mode is going to cause problems for our less savvy user base.

Brass Contributor

We have FAQ's and KB articles that advocate that when a user clicks an excel spreadsheet it opens in read only mode, so don't worry because unless you choose to edit it you can't do any harm.


Changing a behaviour as fundamental as Read only to Edit is quite a surprise.

 

I get it, "agile", teams is "the project that never ends", 60 features landed in 2019, 7 rolling out, 33 in dev, 23,000 + requests in the roadmap, I get that it's going to change.

 

But surely there should be a retention of the existing configuration or status quo, add the option to make "edit" the default, but for those of use already rolling out the product, don't change the defaults.

 

This isn't Facebook, this is a product used in corporate workplaces, where service desks have training schedules and users need to trust a tool to do a job.

 

Changing it overnight, to "tweak" things like the tab names and the default edit behaviour really makes me wonder if the dev team is a generation too young to understand where their product is being used.

 

My pilot user experience is fast becoming redundant, because it's a different product already

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