Microsoft has added new features added to its Teams collaboration service in December 2021. The biggest improvements are end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support, Teams Rooms updates, a new SIP Gateway service, Teams-certified devices, and much more.
New features for Microsoft Teams meetings
Microsoft has made some improvements to Teams meetings. For presenters and organisers MS Teams has a new feature that allows them to view the order of hands raised in a meeting. It enables meeting organisers to quickly identify participants who wish to speak without interrupting the flow of conversations. To use this feature, users need to go to the meeting controls and click the Participants panel.
The meeting recording feature in Microsoft Teams gets new capabilities, including multi-speed playback, high-quality transcripts, indexed recordings, and an auto-expire policy. Organisers can also enable an automatic recording option for Teams meetings.
Chat and collaboration features in Microsoft Teams
The following are chat and collaboration features in Teams. Microsoft Teams is now rolling out an update that allows users to add descriptions to images shared in private or group chats. To do this, right-click on the image and then select the “Add Alt Text” option. The new feature makes Teams posts more accessible to people with disabilities, who can now use screen readers to easily understand the full content of the posts.
Security & Compliance in MS Teams
On to the security and compliance department. Last month, Microsoft announced that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support is generally available for one-to-one Teams conversations. However, some advanced capabilities (such as call transfer, recording, live captioning, and transcription) are not available in E2EE conversations. It is up to IT administrators to manually enable and manage the E2EE feature for all users in their organisation.
New government functions
For government users, breakout room manager support is now available in Government Community Cloud Hight (GCC-High) and Department of Defense (DOD) tenants. The new feature allows meeting organisers to extend management to specific presenters in the breakout rooms settings. These managers can perform various operations such as assigning users to rooms, adding/deleting rooms, setting timers, sending announcements and much more.
Updates and devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms
Microsoft has released a number of new features and capabilities for MS Teams Rooms on Windows, such as meeting room capacity notifications. If a meeting room has overcapacity, the app can now send alerts to meeting room participants based on the data stored in the account. In addition, there is a new feature that provides the ability to split the video gallery across multiple screens when content is not shared during Teams meetings.
Also Microsoft has introduced a new SIP Gateway service that allows organisations to use existing third-party SIP phones with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has also unveiled some new Teams-certified devices, including Jabra PanaCast 20 and Poly Studio Room Kits.
Tech-Wales IT Services
At Tech-Wales we pride ourselves providing excellent Business IT Support combined with our business computer services. We can help you with integration of MS Teams or Microsoft 365 to offer your organisation more flexibility. We have fully trained and customer focused technicians who will make sure that your IT network is always working for you. We provide pay as you go and monthly IT support packages for your business and can help you if you are having any issues with software packages. Feel free to contact us to discuss.