Microsoft released a summary of all updates made to its Teams communication platform in January 2021. Some of the detailed features have already been announced, including the new Approvals application, an offline experience and more. See here everything you need to know.
Chat and collaboration features
The first major area of improvement is chat and collaboration. In January 2021, the company released several enhancements to teams, including a new tool for managing approval requests. The Approvals application gives users the ability to create, manage and share approvals directly from Microsoft Teams. It is compatible with all supported platforms, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Automate, as well as SharePoint.
In addition, there is a new offline experience with support for queuing messages in chats and channels in Teams. The autosend offline option will queue all messages when a device goes offline to send them later when the Internet connection is resumed. IT administrators can now add up to 10,000 users to a team across the organization. Full details can be found here.
Meeting and call features
Moving to Meetings, the collaboration platform acquired the ability to add a shared calendar to a Teams channel. The shared calendar provides quick access to all scheduled meetings and automatically sends notifications to the channel as soon as a member creates a new meeting.
Microsoft Teams also gained support for chat moderation settings, allowing meeting organizers to manage participants’ ability to chat before, during and after a meeting. The company increased its free audio conference offering until June 30, 2021.
For Teams calling experiences, Microsoft noted that Cataleya, ULTATEL, Atos and Patton entered the list of certified SBCs. This integration will make it easier for Teams users to make and receive calls through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in scenarios when linked to the Microsoft Telephone System. To get started, be sure to check this page.
Microsoft Teams devices and more
Teams devices also bring a lot of news, and the company detailed all the new phones, peripherals and monitors developed for the collaboration service. The list includes Logitech Rally Bar, Crestron Flex Mercury Mini, Yealink A30, AudioCodes RXV80 and three Dell video conferencing monitors. These monitors come with a dedicated Microsoft Teams button that allows users to instantly join Microsoft Teams meetings. The newly announced Dell monitors will be available in February 2021.
Finally, there are also some security updates and some new features for education staff, first-rate employees and government customers. Microsoft Teams announced several features for Power Platform and custom development, which can be found in the blog post.