What’s New in Microsoft Teams | November 2020
Published Dec 02 2020 08:00 AM 197K Views

Welcome to December! I know you have been waiting for this post as November has been another month with a lot of great features that will help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams. Let’s jump right in!


What’s New: Meetings
AI-based noise suppression
Our real-time AI noise suppression feature automatically removes unwelcome background noise during your meetings. The AI-based noise suppression analyzes your audio feed filtering out the noise and retaining only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise. 


New Together mode scene selection
Together mode reimagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart. We are excited to introduce new Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater.

TogetherMode.png

 

Polls in Teams Meetings
Polls in Teams meetings is a seamless experience powered by Forms that helps you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. As a meeting organizer or presenter, you can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively. Your attendees can easily view and respond to the polls in the pop-up bubble or chat pane. To enable this feature as the meeting organizer or presenter, simply add the Forms app as a tab in your Teams meeting. Learn more.

 

Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention.

fullscreen.png

 

Start an instant meeting from your mobile device
You'll now find the familiar Meet Now icon on the calendar tab and in the Teams channel helping you connect with your team instantly. Once you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share the invite or add participants directly to the meeting, and anyone in the Teams channel can join without an invite.

InstantMeetingMobile (1).png

 

Updated layout for meetings on iOS 

We have improved the Teams experience on iOS devices with a new presentation mode, the ability to see more participants, and the ability to see shared content and a spotlighted participant concurrently.

Meetings on iOS.png

 

 

What’s new: Calling
Call Merge
While you’re on a call with another person (or a group), you might want to add another expert to participate in the call. Similarly, you may receive an incoming call that makes sense to connect with one you’re already on. Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their Teams VoIP and PSTN active 1-1 calls into another 1-1 call or another group call. You can merge your calls, simply by choosing the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”. Learn more.


Survivable Branch Appliance
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a WAN outage. This SBA is now available to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network.


Ericsson Session Border Controller certification
Ericsson has completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBC supports Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs. This rigorous certification process [insert link here] includes intense 3rd party testing and validation in production and pre-production Direct Routing environments. Direct Routing permits customers to connect their own carriers and infrastructure with Phone System to enable Teams Calling. Learn more.

 


What’s New: Devices
Microsoft Teams displays
Microsoft Teams displays is a new category of all-in-one dedicated Teams devices that features an ambient touchscreen and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana. These devices seamlessly integrate with your PC, providing easy access to Teams chat, meetings, calling, calendar, and files. With natural language, users can ask Cortana to join and present in meetings, dictate replies to a Teams chat, and more. Learn more.

ThinkSmart.png

 

USB phone by Yealink: MP50
The plug and play format of the newly available MP50 by Yealink offers a new way to experience calling features in Teams, allowing you to connect a phone to your PC and start engaging in full phone functionality instantly. The MP50 provides a cost-effective option, giving you a traditional handset experience with a dedicated Teams button, for quick meeting and calling join, as well as USB and Bluetooth connection for both mobile and PC.

Yealink.png

 

Yealink A20
Yealink A20 is an integrated, Android-based Microsoft Teams Room designed for small meeting rooms and huddle spaces. The A20 delivers premium audio and video experiences through a 20-megapixel 133-degree horizontal field of view lens, 8 MEMS microphone array and built-in speaker. The A20 is easy to deploy and brings Teams Rooms features like wireless content sharing and whiteboarding, to small meeting spaces.

Yealink A20.png

 

Poly Sync 20 USB/Bluetooth® smart speakerphone now certified for Microsoft Teams
Poly Sync 20 is a portable personal speakerphone certified for Microsoft Teams that delivers great audio for your meetings as well as music. Combined with up to 20 hours of talk time, the ability to charge your smartphone and IP64 dust and water resistance, it’s a great companion for hybrid workers. Learn more.

Poly Sync 20_Top_Teams_low_res_rgb.jpg

 

New features rolling out to Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub
The latest app for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, version 1.0.94.2020102101, is now available through the Teams Admin Center. New features have also begun rolling out to Surface Hub! Features enabled through this update include:
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android

  • Support for dual screens: Now you can use Teams Rooms on Android in spaces with a dual screen configuration, allowing one screen to be focused on meeting participants in the gallery view, while the second screen can be used to show content or whiteboard.
  • New gallery views: Teams Rooms on Android now supports the 3x3, large gallery, and Together Mode gallery views.
  • Auto-answer for meetings: In some meeting scenarios where Teams Rooms devices are deployed, like a healthcare patient room, meeting participants want to be able to connect to an incoming call without taking an action to accept it. Now, we’re providing a setting that allows calls to be answered automatically. This new feature can be enabled through the Admin settings.

Dual Screen on MTR.png

 

Surface Hub

  • Together mode: view meeting participants in the new Together mode, which brings everyone into a shared virtual space.
  • Large gallery: view up to 49 meeting participants simultaneously in full screen mode,
    in the new 7x7 video grid.

Together Mode on Surface Hub.png

 

 

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

Pinned Posts

Keep important information easily accessible and top of mind with Microsoft Teams. You can pin any message in a channel, and it appears in the channel information pane for all members of the channel to see.

Pinned Post.png

 

More options to use polls, surveys & checklists in Teams
Easily gather information or keep track of things in chat and channels with new app templates for polls, surveys, and checklists in Teams. Once installed and configured by the Teams administrators, these messaging extensions provide a simple and intuitive experience for users across all platforms without the need to use 3rd party apps.


Quickly create and send polls to gather input to make decisions.

 

Easily create surveys to gather feedback to improve your processes.

 

Collaborate with your team and keep things on track by creating a shared checklist.

 

Set presence status duration
Let others know when you are available in Teams by managing your presence status. Users can now change their presence status for a specific period. Learn more.


Android On-Demand Chat Translation
Inline message translation gives all your team members a voice and facilitates global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.

 


What’s New: Power Platform and custom development
Build solutions with Power Apps in Teams
The new Power Apps app for Teams is now generally available. It allows you to build and deploy custom apps without leaving Teams. With the simple, embedded graphical app studio, it has never been easier to build low code apps for Teams. You can also harness immediate value from built in templates like the Great Ideas or Inspections apps, which can be deployed in one click and customized easily. The new Power Apps app for Teams can be backed by a new relational datastore – Dataverse for Teams. Learn more.

 

New Power Automate App for Teams
The new Power Automate app for Teams is now generally available. The new app makes it easier than ever to automate workflows within teams. With the simplified flow designer, you can easily build flows by selecting from a number of templates and simply selecting your options from drop down menus. Also, the home screen of the new app improves your visibility into your flows and let’s manage your flows for Teams from there. Learn more.

 

Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams
Power Virtual Agents (PVA) for Teams is now generally available. Since announcing the PVA preview at Ignite 2020 users have found chat bots useful well as easy to create and we have seen thousands of bots created in the past few weeks. We are now also providing additional features including native authentication, where bots can be designed to provide information to users based upon their identity. You can now also easily make your bot available to your teammates and have admin approval to make it available for the whole organization.

 

Teams apps for meetings now generally available
Teams apps for meetings are now generally available with nearly 20 new apps in the Teams app store, such as Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect, as well as familiar Microsoft apps such as Forms. Learn more. If you’re a developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings.

 

Support for Single Sign-On (SSO) for Bots
We are thrilled that Single Sign-on (SSO) support for bots is now available. SSO authentication in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) minimizes the number of times users need to enter their login credentials by silently refreshing the authentication token. If users agree to use your app, they will not have to consent again on another device and will be signed in automatically. Learn more.


Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge
We’re continuously planning new events and ways to connect with the developer community. For example, Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge. Starting November 16, 2020 through February 8, 2021, developers, partners, and organizations can participate in a challenge to develop a new and innovative Teams App for publishing to AppSource, to be eligible to win a share of $45,000 in cash and prizes. For full challenge details visit http://microsoftteams.devpost.com

App Development Challenge.jpg

 

Learn Together: Developing Apps for Microsoft Teams

We have a free two-hour livestream event coming up for developers by developers around the possibilities and reasons to build apps in Teams. Join us live on December 16 at 9:00 AM PT to be a part of the discussions and learn about creating engaging and unique application experiences on Microsoft Teams. http://aka.ms/learntogether

Picture2.png

 

App Spotlight

service now.png

This month the Now Virtual Agent app by ServiceNow features new capabilities that help improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution – allowing you as a user to submit support requests, view open ticket approvals, act on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, or streamline communication between agents and employees – all while staying in the flow of work in Teams.

 

 

What’s New: Management
Device management automatic alerting in Teams Admin Center
Device management automatic alerting provides more efficiency in identifying devices issues by triggering notifications that can be turned into an immediate correction action.

 

 

What’s New: Teams for Education
Insights across classes and spotlight student activity
New capabilities in Insights helps you as an educator to understand engagement and progress of students over time and across your classes. Now, educators can see high-level trends across classes, like inactive students, active students per day, missed online classes and missed assignments. And within a class, new spotlight cards show trending student behaviors an educator may want to take action on. Learn more.

 

 

What’s New: Firstline Workers
Shift schedule assistance
Shifts schedule assistance will alert managers if conflicts occur anywhere in the schedule and they will receive conflict warnings when approving schedule change requests. This alerting saves managers time, makes shift scheduling more efficient and reduces inaccuracies that lead to employees not turning up for their shift. Learn more.

 

 

What’s New: Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).


Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window, and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention. GCC only in November.

 

OneNote in Teams DoD
You can now add new or existing OneNote Notebooks tab to your Teams channels if you're a DoD customer. You can also go to Files or add OneNote Personal App to open your OneNote notebooks directly. Learn more.


Prevent attendees from unmuting in Teams Meetings
Meeting organizers and presenters in the US Government Community Cloud can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful for press conferences and classrooms scenarios where you want to be in control of who’s speaking. Learn more.

PreventUnmute.png

18 Comments
Deleted
Not applicable

An option to pin a post has arrived, however it doesn't make any visual difference. If I pin a post it gets labeled as pinned, and that's it. Nothing in the channel's header, and the post behaves like an ordinary one, moving away as long as more posts are coming up to the channel. What am I doing wrong?

 

 

Brass Contributor

Agree with previous post, what makes the difference with pinned posts? IMHO unfortunately no one will click on "i" and notice these pinned posts at the bottom...

 

BTW, great with a updated meeting experience! Only for iOS but I really hope it will be there for Windows and other platforms soon. Not the least the Feature ID: 66587 from roadmap "Custom layouts for meetings" is SOOOO very much anticipated!

 

Copper Contributor

the pinned post is also visible in the Channel Information on the ! Button, the question is also if you put it on Top on the Posts how many Posts are enough to cover the whole Entry area :)

Deleted
Not applicable

@Jacob Andersson Oh man, I didn't even know that this tiny "i" exists! :D

Copper Contributor

Where is this “Cortana” option? Im using iPad and nothing is there (by the way,i live in uae so im not sure if its only in us,uk,etc)

Bronze Contributor

Is Teams audio in fact half-duplex, like Skype's? If so, is there an effort afoot to make it full? That would make cross-talking in conversations actually do-able, instead of the way it is now, a series of these: "Oh, sorry, you go ahead."

Bronze Contributor

@Microsoft_Teams_team 

You wrote: "We heard you, full screen mode is back!"

Perhaps there has been a tiny misunderstood? That is not a full screen as we (or at least me) wished to see. Please, try to find a Skype for Business client and see how the meetings are handled. I know, you do hate to follow Skype, but there you had the solutions already:

- When someone share the screen, attendees should focus to the content and not looking for the avatars (if they like), so option to select a full screen for presentation is highly appreciated for attendees. This is helping also if you do have a small laptop screen. Especially when someone shares an application.

- When you have two screens, isn't that a normal, that you could look the presentation (in a full screen mode) on one screen and avatars on next (in a full screen mode).

- Call/Meeting controls can appear on screen when needed, they doesn't need to be there all the time.

Steel Contributor

The execution of adding apps into a meeting makes me wonder if Microsoft does any feedback sessions before releasing these.  After running training sessions with a few high use users, the biggest complaints i get is 'how do i get to that weird meeting screen', and 'how can i add the form from the meeting window'.

 

Why is there so many unnecessary hoops to jump through!

Copper Contributor

I se tat the Noice reduction not is in the Mac Client When will it cone there?

Copper Contributor

@Microsoft_Teams_team 
In section about Ericsson SBC certification, please add link; "This rigorous certification process [insert link here] ..."

Copper Contributor

What is the version that will bring us all these things? Is there an expected release date?

Copper Contributor

Oh how cool... But mb better add some BASIC functionalities like reply for desktop app or ability to edit message?
I can't understand admiration for Teams without some basic features...

Brass Contributor

In Teams Admin Center, under Teams Rooms the filter option for "Health" - "Unhealthy" has disappeared. Please bring it back as that was the most useful filter choice for me. I could quickly look for unhealthy rooms first thing every morning, now I have to sort through hundreds of rooms to see if I have any issues I need to address.

Brass Contributor

"Notifications and Alerts" as shown above is not in my tenant/Teams Admin Center. When can we expect this to roll out to GA?

Iron Contributor

Hey, what happened to the video on AI Noise Suppression?

Copper Contributor

I'm just curious to see how quickly Microsoft rolls out Teams updates for us Linux users.  My primary computer for work runs Ubuntu 20.04, while my gaming laptop has Windows 10.  The difference in Teams on the two environments is night and day.  I would LIKE to see a more uniform experience.  Can we at least get selected screen shares, a group view of at least 3x3, and the ability to change backgrounds on Linux like we do on the Windows version?

Copper Contributor

The new full screen option is NOT full screen! The top bar does not hide which means that black bars appears at the sides of the shared screen to keep the aspect ratio fixed. Please look at the full screen option in the previous Teams experience, which is really full screen. I can't believe why such a basic essential feature requires so much discussion. :sad:

Brass Contributor

Agree with @marcoc88 , and why does MacOS seems to support "real" full screen but not Windows? 

Version history
Last update:
‎Aug 24 2022 05:22 PM
Updated by: