This month we noticed several new Microsoft Teams enhancements designed to ensure a better user experience. In this feature update, we will highlight new General Availability features and explain how they benefit your day-to-day work. Also, we noticed that a few items from previous months were moved back on the deployment schedule roadmap. These are covered at the end of this blog.
1. Chat Density
This feature introduces a new, optional setting for users to increase the density of viewable content on Teams Chat via “Compact” mode. Compact mode allows the user to see more content given the same screen size vs. the existing layout. You can customize the number of chat messages you see on the screen and use the compact setting to fit 50% more messages on the screen. The “comfy” setting keeps the chat display as it is in Teams today. This feature will only impact the chat and not conversations in Teams and Channels.
2. Delay Delivery of Chat Messages
You can send a chat message at a set time, and the message will arrive at its destination at the time you scheduled. The chat message delay delivery feature is helpful for sending messages to your colleagues in different time zones and for minimizing disruptions in their away time. This is like the Outlook delay sent message feature.
3. New Fluent Emoji Style Coming to Teams Emojis and Reactions
Teams is joining Microsoft 365 and Windows in updating all emojis and reactions to the new Microsoft Fluent emoji style, bringing users a more vibrant and expressive emoji experience. This feature will allow users to be more expressive by choosing an emoji that best fits their current mood or help make a point in a chat.
4. Walkie Talkie on Teams Phone
Like traditional walkie talkies, the Walkie Talkie app on your Teams Phone provides an instant push-to-talk (PTT) communication for your team. It lets you press and hold a button to speak to your team and release the button to listen. Users can connect with their team using the Teams channels.
This brings me back to the Nextel days with push-to-talk. I can still hear the sound in my head just thinking about it. Every day I have found times where this PTT feature would be helpful. I think this could reduce chat messages and provide another hands-free option to save time and long messages.
5. Live Captions and Transcript in All Available Languages in Teams Meeting on the Web
In the Microsoft Teams client today, live captions and transcript are available in 28 languages. The language selected is the language for everyone in the meeting so make sure that everyone in that meeting speaks that language. The feature will bring that capability to users that join meeting via the web browser.
6. Workspace Management
Workspace Management is a new feature within Teams Admin Center that provides an integrated view of Teams devices and peripherals based on their location, along with relevant insights. This capability provides IT admins the ability to manage connected devices and monitor workspace health, utilization, and conformance to standards at any location.
Updates on Reschedules
Microsoft will occasionally reschedule features to fit their deployment timeline. This section will cover any updates from our previous blogs that were rescheduled. Click on the URLs below to see the roadmap item update.
- Co-organizer Meeting Role | Feature ID 81391
- Pin chat messages | Feature ID 82584
- Notifications During Meetings| Feature ID 87452
- Pairing the channel and the corresponding SharePoint folder name | Feature ID 72211
- Home Page Customization for Teams Admin Center | Feature ID 85703
In Conclusion
The feature deployment of the Microsoft 365 Platform comes in many waves, across multiple tenants, and in different phases. Microsoft has many phased release cycles for their environments. The features are more for the enterprise environment, and the governance tenants may vary on the release. You can access the full Microsoft 365 Roadmap here.
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