Information on the latest updates from Microsoft that will affect your business.
This month Microsoft has lots of new features and feature enhancements.
Microsoft Teams Updates
1. Intelligent Meeting Recap
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
For users with a Teams Premium license, Intelligent Meeting Recap is a comprehensive AI-powered meeting recap experience that helps users catch-up, recall, and follow-up on hour-long meetings in minutes by providing recording and transcription playback with AI assistance. Located on the new ‘Recap’ tab in Teams calendar and Chat app, this experience also allows users to browse the recording by speakers, and topics, as well as access AI-generated suggested notes, suggested tasks, and @mentions.
Mid-May and expect to complete by late May.
2. Collaborative Meeting Notes
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
Users within your tenant will see a Notes button during meetings that invokes these new capabilities. The meeting notes will be shown on the right pane of the meeting window with the ability to open them in the browser for more room or on a second monitor. Participants can collaborate in real time, create an agenda, take notes and add tasks. When participants are assigned a task in the meeting, they will also receive an email notification and it will be synced with the Planner and To Do apps.
When this will happen:
Late May and expect to complete by late June.
3. Mark All As Read for Activity Feed
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
Users can triage their activity feed more efficiently using the new ‘Mark all as read’ feature. With just one click, users can mark all unread activities as read.
When this will happen:
Early June and expect to complete rollout by late June.
4. User request configuration to external systems (URL redirect)
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
Microsoft Teams apps help facilitate collaboration and enhance team productivity. Some organizations choose to control which apps their users can use, blocking apps from use until IT has reviewed and approved them. For these organizations, the recent app discovery update (MC350372) enables users to indicate which blocked apps they want to use, allowing IT to focus their attention on the apps their users want. As always, IT retains control over which apps their users can use.
We heard from some IT organizations that they have existing processes to manage how users should request access to apps, and they want to use these same processes for approving Teams apps as well. In response, we are adding optional organizational settings to enable Teams admins to customize the experience for their users to request access to apps that are blocked from use.
These settings include:
A customizable instructional message shown to users when they find an app that’s blocked from use. The default message is “This app requires approval from your IT admin to make it available for you to add.”
- An IT provided URL that will open in a browser when users click the “Request approval” button to request access to an app (e.g., IT support ticketing systems, user education pages, or corporate policy pages).
- In the Teams app store, users who discover apps that are blocked from use will see the customized instructional message (if provided) on the app details page and be redirected to the URL (if provided) when the “Request approval” button is clicked.
When this will happen:
April 2023
5. Enhanced Capabilities for Managing Deleted and Expiring Teams from the Teams admin center
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
We are updating Teams admin center with new capabilities to manage deleted & expiring teams. Teams' administrators can now view deleted and expiring teams, restore deleted teams and renew expiring teams from Teams Admin Center.
When this will happen:
Late April and is expected to be complete by mid-May.
6. Spatial audio in Teams meetings
NEW FEATURE
How this will affect your organisation:
Spatial audio brings a next-generation immersive soundscape to Teams meetings when using either a wired stereo headset or built-in stereo speakers. This new audio experience spatializes the voices of attendees across the visual meeting stage in the Gallery view. This helps make conversations more natural, increasing the sense of audio presence, and making the conversation easier to follow when multiple people are speaking together.
When this will happen:
Late May and expect to complete rollout by mid-June.