Welcome to 2022 and another new year of new Teams features. This month is stacked with Microsoft Teams Meeting enhancements to ensure a better user experience when organizing and participating in meetings (and to make a stronger case to compete with other meeting providers). In this first of many blog updates, we will highlight new General Availability features and explain how they benefit your day-to-day work.
1. Add a Group of Approvers to Your Approval Request
In the Microsoft Teams Approvals App, users can only select individuals for the approvers. Users will be able to select Office 365 groups as approvers when creating a new approval request within the Teams Approvals App. This feature will allow for consistency on selecting approvers and prevent accidently leaving approvers out of the process.
2. Local Time Added to People Profile
Collaborating with people across the world in various time zones is a challenging task. Before calling or scheduling a meeting with someone, you must know their local time. Soon, Microsoft Teams will be adding a new feature that will allow you to easily find out the local time of the people you collaborate with by checking their profile card. If you want to change or update your display language and / or time zone in Microsoft 365, click here.
3. Manage What Attendees See
When running meetings in Microsoft Teams, the organizer or presenter can share their screen during the meeting. In many scenarios, the presenter can share the wrong information during the meeting. This feature enables organizers and presenters to manage what attendees see and easily minimize distractions to keep the audience engaged during an event. This ensures that attendees will only see shared content and participants that are brought on screen.
4. Mirror My Video
The “mirror my video” feature provides the user the option to un-mirror their video and thereby have the same view as the other users(s) in the meeting. It will make it easier for presenters to mirror their video and read the text written on a physical whiteboard during virtual presentations. This feature is helpful in gallery, large gallery, PowerPoint-content only sharing, and PowerPoint-live scenarios.
5. Pin Chat Messages
Pin a Teams chat message to drive awareness and provide the chat members with quick access to important content. Pinning will help your team stay in sync on what’s relevant in a timely manner.
6. User Request Flows for Blocked Apps
As part of the Security and Compliance features around information governance, IT admin can block users from adding Third-Party apps to their Teams including channels. This feature will enable users to discover Teams apps in the store and request approval from administrators. This gives the admins a process to control what users will be able to use and provide the users with a consistent request process for adding new Third-Party apps to Teams.
7. Yammer, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Stream: Yammer Encoded Events Powered by Microsoft Teams
Today in Yammer, the video stream and production in a Live Event is powered by Stream. With this feature, all Live Events (production and the video stream itself within Yammer) will be powered by Microsoft Teams – giving a more seamless management and experience for the moderator, organizer, and participants.
8. Auto-Expiration of Meeting Recordings Stored on OneDrive and SharePoint
Newly created Teams meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint will be automatically deleted by the service based on a default Teams policy setting. Teams Admins will be able to modify the default meeting recording expiration time via a setting in the Teams Admin Portal or by modifying policy attributes using PowerShell scripts. Newly created meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint will be automatically deleted after this point unless the meeting owner extends the expiration. Meeting owners will be notified about expired recordings and may extend the expiration date in OneDrive / SharePoint. Compliance policies will override the expiration setting.
9. Home Page Customization for Teams Admin Center
The current home page for the Teams Admin Center provides the administrators standard widgets like Organizational information, Deployment status, User search widget, Teams Users activity, and release notes for teams. This change will enable the IT admins the capabilities to drag and drop widgets to customize their Home page in Teams admin center – making it more unique to meet the needs of the IT admins.
In Conclusion
The feature deployment of 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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