Async in MS Teams

[Rod Falanga]

I love Microsoft Teams. It's my favorite chat and communication app. We're adopting Teams again, after having tried WebEx for a year.

However, there is one major area that Teams seems to fall short of; that is asynchronous meetings/collaboration. At the height of the pandemic many organizations around the world adopted asynchronous meeting styles and apps which made this possible. Teams, as far as I know, doesn't support this at all. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know, but I suspect I am not wrong. Organizations which are distributed around large geographic regions cannot easily have synchronous meetings. And even large groups which are distributed in the same time zone, can benefit from asynchronous meetings. I work for a large state government department with about 3500 employees, all of which use Teams. The number of meetings I am in has progressively increased year over year, since March 2020. It's become a burden. I've communicated this to others, such as my boss, but I don't see this trend slowing down.

I'd like to know will MS Teams add the ability to have meetings or collaboration sessions asynchronously? Or should we look for other asynchronous solutions?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rod Falanga  We're glad to hear you're a fan of Teams and appreciate your comments for improving the product.  We have two sites where you can check for answers to your questions:

1. The Teams feedback portal allows users such as yourself to suggest product features and improvements and let others vote on their importance.  Check out that website.

2.  The M365 roadmap lists the features in development and approximate release dates.

[#3]

Can you explain in common terms what an Async meeting in Teams would work? Obviously text chat can happen async, so are you talking about exchanging short video clips?

[#4]

Hi Rob,

Yes, texts in a team chat are asynchronous. However, I'm mean for both audio and video. For example, if I could leave a short voice message, which would be listened to later by my teammates. And they could respond in kind if they wanted to. Or a short video where I might point something out in code or a PowerPoint slide, that others would watch later.

[#5]

I saw an announcement for Async video messages in Teams, but it seemed more 1-1. I think you are envisioning within a Meeting construct. That might be possible. You might have to start a meeting, start the chat and then everyone can send Asycn videos.

[#6]

Hmmm. I'll have to try it. Thank you, Rob.

[#7]

I don't know if it is out yet, they call it "Video Clips"

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-teams-getting-video-clip-feature-like-snapchat/

[#8]

That Video Clips feature is definitely more of what I'm talking about. Thank you for sharing, Rob!