What’s new and coming for Teams from Microsoft Ignite

It has been a magnificent Microsoft Ignite so far!! The keynote show was different this year than before: it happened all around in the Hub and 3000 attendees were there to see everything quite close. The big message was about Tech intensity.

It was great to be able to view the Keynote from different places. This time I didn’t try to get into the central area but instead I were around Teams booths to enjoy the show from screens.

So what’s new and coming that is Teams related

Microsoft has released a bunch of blog posts that dig deeper in these matters. In my blog I highlight ones I see relevant for the modern work and around Teams focus. If I did miss something.. I get back to that in a later post. 😊 There was so much that was released either now or in nearby months that it is easy to miss a feature or two. In it’s core – Teams is about modern work and life – it is not about individual features but how we benefit them as unity to be more productive and enjoy it.

Microsoft Blogs:

Private Channels. Yes – they are rolling out as you read this on Monday – Tuesday. They will be available on tenants during November. This should make a lots of Teams users happy.

Yammer. You read it right – the Year of Yammer (#YearOfYammer) brought back Yammer as solid organization community tools – even groups were renamed to communities. Teams is getting Yammer application and admin can it pin easily to the left rail to access company community. There is of course a Yammer tab application and updated web part to SharePoint.

Project Cortex connects people to content and content to people. “..empowers people with and teams with knowledge, learning and expertise..”. In it’s core AI automatically classifies information from various sources and enables users to find information related to specific topic. In short it automatically understands the document and tags the information. This is what I was hoping for : automatic metadata of documents what can be used to find and reuse information. There is also a drill in to topic page which shows all information about the topic. People are also tagged you be topic experts to make it possible to find experts. This is currently in private preview. http://aka.ms/projectcortex and Introducing Project Cortex

https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/project-cortex-microsoft-365/

You can publish PowerApps application to Teams as an application. It was possible to add a PowerApps as Teams tab before, but now you can publish PowerApps as Teams applications (just like SharePoint web parts) allowing an easier discovery, adding it as a application to a tab and pinning the most important apps to left rail for easy accessibility and usability.

Upcoming Tasks will combine all tasks from different sources (Planner, To-Do ) into a single view in a single Teams application -which you can again pin to the left rail in Teams. It makes seeing and acting on tasks in Teams easy and fun. Yes. Fun. Compared to the need to visit different apps to see & start your tasks.

Teams Whiteboard has gone to GA. You can use Whiteboard in your internal meetings, just open it to your meeting via sharing button. Whiteboard board a infinite-scaling canvas where you can all collaborate together using ink. And Whiteboard has now Templates you can use – I really like the Kanban template. To use Templates you need to use Whiteboard Windows App.

Multiwindow chat & meeting experience will come reality! With this feature you can pop out chat and meeting to a separate window. I know lots of people who will be very happy about this feature.

Live Captions will be making meetings for accessible and easier to follow. It will support only English first (in preview), but if you have a meeting with people from different countries and cultures you make the meeting more easy when you will be able read captions in real time. When this feature advances, it will be awesome step closer to Star Trek future – and potion of that is already usable! Live Captions have been in preview for Live Meetings earlier but now it will be able to use them on standard Teams meetings as well.

Presenter and attendee controls will be available this year. These enable the traditional controls for a meetings: who are presenters (can control sharing, muting and recordings) and who are attendees (thus these can’t hijack the meeting via sharing anymore).

Safe links in Teams.

New Files experience is already rolling out. This will be accompanied by new sharing experience later. New Files experience basically brings SharePoint file view into Teams files-tab, allowing Teams to work better with managed document management and other SharePoint capabilities. It is not 1:1 to SharePoint Files but it is very close.

Pinning channels has already appeared on my tenant.

Outlook will be better connected to Teams as well. Ability to move conversations into Teams will be there soon. This is more easier and user-friendly than having to find out channel’s email address and forwarding the email to Teams.

Firstline workers get new capabilities like Off-shift access (available 2020) can notify firstline workers if they accessing teams on personal device when they are not working. New authentication capabilities will make it possible for firstline workers to sign into Teams using phone number and one-time SMS passcode. And there will also be Global Sign-Out that lets employees to log out of all their apps in one time.

Microsoft Teams Rooms will be able to connect to Cisco WebEx and Zoom starting next year. Managed Meeting Rooms, a cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service for Teams Rooms, will offer expert management and enhanced insights when managing. Coming to GA in spring 2020.

Teams Admin Center new features make it easier to manage devices, usage, and deployment of Teams. There will be capabilities to managed Microsoft Teams Rooms in one place. Certified app catalog allows admins to see all Teams certified apps and ability to load company’s own apps. New Advisor for Teams gives admins guidance how to implement a successful rollout.

Teams client for Linux will be available in public preview during this year.

There will also be Kaizala capabilities that will appear in Teams: Checklist, polls and surveys.

Upload and use of larger files in Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. You can start using 100GB and when using OneDrive Sync you get the benefit of only syncing changes (differential sync) – not full files always. SharePoint Site Collection limit is going to be 2 million (2 000 000) instead of current 500 000.

And there is more..

Microsoft Ignite has been huge so far and a lots of more will happening throughout the week. There is a big number of news to SharePoint, Yammer, Azure, Power Platform (Power Automate for example) , etc. Look for the information in Microsoft blogs. However, since looking was mentioned you may want to check out new, updated SharePoint Lookbook in lookbook.microsoft.com

I will dig deeper to many features and capabilities, especially on Teams, in my future articles – now this serves as a simple and short collection around what’s new & coming out in Teams. Stay tuned!