Teams summer summary: what’s new and what is coming out soon

This year’s summer vacation is but a memory and it is time to get back to normal routines – blogging about news, insights, tips and tricks. Here is my collection of interesting what’s happened around Teams and it’s roadmap during the summer break.

Skype for Business Online & hybrid is retiring 31.7.2021

is of course big news announced just recently. If you are using Skype for Business Online or you have a Hybrid setup it means that the last day for those is 31.7.2021. You should migrate into Teams well ahead that deadline. And why wouldn’t you? With Teams you get a modern meeting/collaboration/calling solution that encourages to make it your hub for teamwork.

If you are using Skype (consumer) or on premise Skype for Business Server this does not apply to you. Server version support continues as planned.

See more info from support article: https://support.microsoft.com/fi-fi/help/4511540/retirement-of-skype-for-business-online

Starting 1.9. all new Office 365 tenants come with Teams enabled

In the same support article it is also mentioned that all new Office 365 tenants will be Teams enabled starting 1.9.2019. This does not affect existing customers, which continue to upgrade to Teams following earlier plans (automatic upgrades happen based on some criteria, but most heavily used tenants are upgrade by partners/it departments)

Teams summer updates (some of them)

Adding multiple accounts into Teams mobile app. Works on Android (at least) and the switch between tenants is occasionally fast! The speed seems to be related to what is cached and does the account require more authentication checking / MFA. But overall, the switch is faster than before. Note: once you add a account you can’t remove it currently (however, you can choose the profile and manually sign out of it which removes it). Also: if your phone/application is managed by your organization, depending on organization settings, it can cause issues with other accounts.

Updated toolbar for meetings & calls

Teams App permission & setup policies finally appeared on many tenants.

Manage discoverability of private teams. Admins can set the option on to allow team owners to choose if their private team can be found with team search. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-discovery-of-private-teams
And oh yeah, there is already a switch for allowing private channel creation. That is on by default.

Priority notifications are now usable and they work with guest users as well.

at-less mentions, ie: when you write a persons name you can click with a mouse to person’s name to make the name atmention. I still prefer using @mention as before, but I see it will be useful to many people.
Upcoming Live captions for meetings and live events. Supported spoken languages are English, Chinese and German. These can be live-captioned and live-translated onto 50 different languages (presenters can choose 6 out of that 50). https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-live-captions-in-a-live-event-1d6778d4-6c65-4189-ab13-e2d77beb9e2a (August)
Upcoming Channel moderation: owners can choose moderators and which channels are moderated and how. This is very useful for org-wide teams in larger organizations. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-channel-moderation-in-teams
Teams Rooms got a update that allows the use of Whiteboard, new call controls etc. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Microsoft-Teams-Rooms-July-Update/ba-p/758164
Network planner can be found in Teams Admin center: https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/networkplanner/organization

Still on the roadmap

Focus mode using MyAnalytics Focus Time scheduling. This changes Teams status to “Focusing” and silences all notifications (August)
Native federation for 1:1 chats in Teams Only (August) & real time presence
new Calendar app may or may not appear this year. The roadmap day is update to Q1/ 2020 but text still talks about 2019.
Channel Cross Posting, allowing to post the same message into multiple channels/teams at once. Changes to the original post will reflect into all channels/teams the message was cross-posted to. (September)
new sharing experience (September)
new files experience (September)
Private channels has now a roadmap schedule: September.
Teams and consumer Skype chat & calling interop, making it possible to chat and call with consumer Skype users – and vice versa. Coming in 2020.
Custom background in video call. Should be out sooner than later, but no schedule is given.

Overall, looking at roadmap it seems that September will be the month when Teams is getting it’s next bigger update. However, it is good to keep in mind that the roadmap schedule can change – and it often changes very often. Also: September may be the month when these features begin their rollout.