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.

YammerAppInTeams.gif

 

 

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.

Whiteboard animation.gif

 

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.

3P meeting indicator.png

 

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.

MicrosoftTeams-image.png

 

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.

SMS Sign In - TEAMS.gif

 

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.

Off shift demo gif (final).gif

 

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.

global sign out gif.gif

 

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.

VC pics both1.png

 

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.

AdvisorForTeams.gif

 

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.

MTR Management crop.gif

 

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
Silver Contributor

I'm not a big fan of changing from conversations to posts either as it looks like Microsoft is trying to make Teams a social and not a work platform by changing the name.  Yammer can have posts but Teams should have conversations.  

Brass Contributor

I've searched the Outlook AddIns page for 'Share to Teams' but I can't find it.

Is this released yet? In the UK? How do I get it?

Copper Contributor

Hello @PaulF707  . This is information from Microsoft

Teams-Outlook Email Integrations is a set of three new features designed to help you share information between Microsoft Teams and Outlook:

  • Share email to Teams
  • Share a copy of an email and any attachments from Outlook to a channel or chat in Teams.
  • Share conversation via email
  • Share a copy of a Teams channel or chat conversation via email directly from the Teams client.
  • Reply to Teams missed activity emails
  • Ability to respond to Teams missed activity emails directly within Outlook clients, as well as see the latest missed messages.

Rolling into general availability starting in mid-January and complete roll out by early February.

Brass Contributor

Thanks! @Morten_A 

Copper Contributor

Will there be a way to manage this feature - enabling and disabling it by user or tenant wide?

Copper Contributor

Am quite interested in a lot of these upcoming enhancements, however the one I'd like to see is Teams Rooms being made available as an app which could be used on Android so that we can use that with our existing PC/camera set-ups etc

Brass Contributor

Are there any specific requirements for these features? If we have Exchange on-premise 2013 and Office 2013, will these features be also available to us?

Copper Contributor

Looking forward to seeing the updates when my organisation pushes out to everyone. :)

 

Brass Contributor

Any update on Teams-Outlook Email Integrations? It's already end of January and still no info. Will it be available soon?

Copper Contributor

This has really been the one piece in my opinion that has slowed the adoption amongst the more traditional users. 

Brass Contributor

Adding access to our email in an already unstable Teams platform is the very last thing on our list. 

Plenty of original functionality in Teams is still badly broken with support in North America supposedly so overwhelmed that Microsoft is already dumping paying customers like us onto graveyard shift off-shore support contacts, and some strangely incompetent off-shore support. 

We expected Teams telephony to be fully stable a year ago, but find this month that SBC setup process is still broken, third-party Microsoft telephony partners still can't complete setups without invasive administrative access, the dialing capability that's supposed to appear in Teams for users may never show up without Microsoft intervention, and there are still dead telephone resources that the broken Teams and Skype admin centers will not allow us to delete (and have left Microsoft Support baffled and unable to correct). 

 

Teams is still missing functions to purge stale user-to-user conversations for security and compliance reasons. Some of Teams subscriptions functions to add external content into channels are broken with cryptic errors. 

 

And my favorite is a horrendous GPU acceleration bug when Teams users on new Intel-based laptops with a combo of Intel CPU GPU and Nvidia GPU cause the app to corrupt its own display space. Off shore support for that issue is so incompetent that they keep demanding network logs that we will never provide for such an obvious intrinsic bug in the Teams app. 

Brass Contributor

Teams-Outlook Email Integrations is a set of three new features designed to help you share information between Microsoft Teams and Outlook:

  • Share email to Teams
  • Share a copy of an email and any attachments from Outlook to a channel or chat in Teams.
  • Share conversation via email
  • Share a copy of a Teams channel or chat conversation via email directly from the Teams client.
  • Reply to Teams missed activity emails
  • Ability to respond to Teams missed activity emails directly within Outlook clients, as well as see the latest missed messages.

Rolling into general availability starting in mid-January and complete roll out by early Februar

Has the rollout (in Germany) now been started or not. Especially the Share E-Mail from Outlook to Teams.

Iron Contributor

@Torsten Küsters although "early February" is now over, the new Outlook to Teams capabilities still aren't showing up for us in the U.S.  At least not in my tenant. I had set a reminder to check for it.  I'll be back to check near the end of the month.  Also hoping for multi-window/break out chat functionality soon.  About 6 more weeks of "early 2020".

Brass Contributor

So I'm a little confused. As of this writing it is March 6th. Is Featured ID: 57389 available? I can't find it in the Add-In catalog.

 

@David Razorsek there is a what's new for Teams post for Feb. where they said there was an issue with rollout on the Outlook side. It targeted for end of month. 

Brass Contributor

Thanks @Chris Webb I missed that.

Brass Contributor

@Chris Webb can you share a link to that "What's new for teams" page/post?. Thank you in advance!

Brass Contributor

@CG-1717 
See top of this conversation

Brass Contributor

@Torsten Küsters I think the commenter might have meant an accurate and up to date list. A lot of what’s in here gets moved around but not always updated.

Brass Contributor

Can you please provide an accurate update on the timeline of the Outlook Teams Integration. Q1 is over and still no update... 

Now with many people in home-office this essential feature is needed more than ever. 

Copper Contributor

Are any of the new features going to make teams accessible to braille users which it is currently not? It is a fact that Teams has never been accessible to many site impaired users who rely on braille displays and/or screen readers. Microsoft is aware of these issues since mid-2018 at least, based on what I see on the University of Colorado website. See University of Colorado - Boulder: Microsoft Teams - Accessibility and Accessibility Current Status.  How can Microsoft continue to state that this product is accessible and keep moving forward to replace Skype with Teams. Skype is not as robust but at least it is accessible. Unfortunately Microsoft's end-of-life date for Skype for Business Online is July 2021 so how about spending time and money to make Teams accessible before Skype disappears. 

Brass Contributor

As of this writing April 6th featured ID: 57389 we have the Teams to Outlook feature available. However there are some bugs and we are working with Microsoft on them.

 

Is Outlook to Teams Email Integrations available? I can't find it in the Add-In catalog and it doesn't appear in my Outlook menu bar, but it appears some of our users have the feature and are using it.

 

 

Silver Contributor

@David Razorsek, well, it looks like based on your comment that they are working out the bugs for Teams for Outlook.

Brass Contributor

@Jeffrey Allen it does. But when some team members apparently have it and the administrators don't, that raises some flags. That's why I want to know what's going on.

Brass Contributor

Can you please update the expected launch date for Featured ID: 57389?

 

I check https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&filters=&searchterms=57389 weekly. We are past Q1 CY 2020 and the article hasn't been updated since 1/30/2020. Thanks.

Brass Contributor

I requested an update of the release date more than 2 weeks ago. Still no answer… Seems like Microsoft abandoned this feature and focuses solely on improving video chat functionality.

Steel Contributor

I keep seeing notifications that the ability to Pop Out chats has started to release for people.  Does anyone know if this really is popping out of all the things mentioned up above (chats, meetings, calls or documents) or if it really is just the chats and the other things are coming later?  I'd much rather have the ability to pop out a meeting and move it to a different screen so I can keep using my chats and other Teams features during a meeting.

Thanks.

Brass Contributor

Does any of these backlog has been released yet?

Brass Contributor

No one here is surprised to learn that priorities have been changed since COVID-19. Microsoft it is ok to admit that. We know it happened.

 

Our issue as that working as ambassadors for Microsoft, we need updated information to pass on to our businesses. Microsoft’s lack of updated information is making Microsoft look bad and it is making its ambassadors look bad as well.

Copper Contributor

Couple of questions:

Is there a plan for including Gantt Chart functionality in Teams?

Is there a plan for adding year to the calendar view besides Week and Month? 

Copper Contributor

Any update on Teams/Outlook integration, feature 57389? At a minimum is there any demo of what this functionality will look like? That way we can determine if it's worth waiting for or looking at a third party tool. 

Copper Contributor

Difícil é definir qual funcionalidade é a melhor nesta listagem :hearteyes:

Que venham logo!

Brass Contributor

@Karan Nigam three questions on the Outlook Share to Teams functionality if I may:

  1. Is this available in the Outlook desktop client in all channels and versions of Microsoft 365 Apps/ProPlus, or is their a minimum version?
  2. Is this available to on-prem Exchange users?
  3. Why does the Outlook Share to Teams feature use the Internet Explorer engine on Windows? :facepalm:
Steel Contributor

KILL IE NOW!

Brass Contributor

Any update on the ETA of the Outlook-Teams integration? We are at the end of Q2, the estimate was Q1. 

Microsoft please...

The missing link between Outlook and Teams is one of the major limitations in getting users to adapt to Teams. Copying channel mail addresses is too complicated and takes too much time in the everyday workflow. Please publish this feature asap..

 

Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks!

Brass Contributor

As we start Q3, any updates on Q1's Featured ID: 57389?

Copper Contributor

How sad is it that no one is getting any response to any of their questions from Microsoft? What is the point of allowing comments on blog posts if the blogger or Microsoft makes no effort to respond to their customers. Sure, comments are a way to connect with your customers get their feedback but some questions deserve a response, especially the one that has been asked since January - WHEN? As usual, I don't think anyone from Microsoft is listening. Instead of titling this Blog Post "New innovations in Microsoft Teams enhance collaboration and business processes for all workers" this should be named "Nothing new in Microsoft Teams to enhance collaboration - Workers with disabilities now joined by others unable to use Teams." Those of you feeling ignored, you are not alone. You have just joined 15% of the worlds population.

Steel Contributor

Any Updates on the Share Email to Teams Feature?

Brass Contributor

Same question from me - this feature should have been out in Feb. Then it was pushed back to April. It's now three months later - can we expect it in 2020 at all maybe?

Brass Contributor

Any ETA when the Teams Outlook integration is gonna be available? According to the roadmap the feature has been released in March and is rolling out since then? Without this, teams collaboration is totally inconveinient for daily tasks and user acceptance is basically zero...

Brass Contributor

Just wanted to point out that joining Teams Meetings from TMRs is now in preview (Release Notes here)!

Not quite "Early 2020" but no one is using our TMRs right now so... 🤷‍:male_sign:

2020-10-01_11-02-19.jpg

Unfortunately a small thing called Covid kicked in and not all R&D teams could develop, it was public that Zoom shut down R&D to work on security and scale.  Reason it is preview is due to video quality on the Zoom web client side.  Once that is better quality, I guess the preview tag will be removed.

I've put together an overview here on the DGJ for Zoom including a video demo here.

Steel Contributor

Great article, thanks Graham.  

 

Sorry to be "that guy", but do you have any info on when this and Webex will hit Surface Hub?

Thanks David.  Not sure on the Surface Hub, maybe @Christian Schacht knows a time frame?

Co-Authors
Version history
Last update:
‎Aug 24 2022 05:29 PM
Updated by: