As is typical at the end of the month, Microsoft is recapping the new features that you'll find in its Teams collaboration platform. There was no roundup for February, probably because the spring Ignite conference was at the beginning of March and as you'd expect, there was a ton of Teams news there.
In the 'meetings and webinars' department, we've got live transcription with speaker attribution, something that landed last week. Adding speaker attribution to live transcription is a big deal, as anyone who has tried to read through transcription with multiple speakers will tell you. Now it won't just be a big blob of text. Microsoft also recently introduced Intelligent Speakers for Teams, which will actually be able to tell who is speaking in the same physical space.
Next up is a new feature called meeting recap. It includes the meeting recording, transcript, chat, attached files, and more. You can find it in the Chat and Details tabs, and it's designed for people that missed the meeting, arrived late, or just want a refresh.
Teams has arrived in Outlook for Windows via a new 'Meet Now' button, and you'll find it in the Calendar tab assuming your admin has turned it on. Also, if you use audio conferencing, you can choose to mask people's phone numbers, or just mask them to external users.
Another notable feature is that there are new customizations for the feature to allow people to bypass the lobby. You can set it to people in your company, or people in your company, trusted organizations, and guests.
On the Mac side of things, you'll find that outgoing video now works if you're using the web app in Safari. Also, Teams is adding meeting controls to the Touch Bar, so you can open the participants panel, raise your hand, and so on. On iPads, you can now present content by choosing the 'join as presenter' option.
There are also some big improvements on Android, which are already on iOS. You can now see up to 20 participants on a phone and 30 on a tablet, and you'll be able to see participants and shared content at the same time.
All of that was for meetings and webinars, so we're not even close to done. Next up is the calling category. First up is voice-enabled channels, which let you connect a call queue to a channel in Teams. It's made for IT help desks, HR hotlines, and so on.
Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) keeps you up and running even when your network is down. If there's an outage, your PSTN call will switch to the SBA automatically and users shouldn't even notice any interruption. Once everything is back, the call switches back.
Next up is the devices category, as there are always new Teams devices rolling out. There are new headsets from EPOS, specifically the ADAPT 100 series. They have a Teams button to easily join calls. The Poly Trio C60 just got certified for Teams Rooms, as it was previously an IP conference phone. Another headset is the Poly Savi 7300 Office series, and it meets DECT security Step C. And then there's the Poly Studio P15, which is a USB 4K video bar that has a webcam, speaker, and microphone all in one piece.
Next is the chat and collaboration category. On Android devices, there's on-demand chat translation, which is obviously great for breaking down the language barrier on a platform that breaks down the distance barrier. There's also support for 250GB files in Teams now, whereas the previous limit was 100GB.
Also included is Viva, something that Microsoft announced in February. Viva Connections is now available, as is Viva Insights.
For templates, there's PowerShell support, as well as the ability to manage them with policies. You can also add a lot more people to teams. A team can now have up to 25,000 members. And admins that manage a team with less than 10,000 people can create an org-wide team.
There's all of that, and there's more. Other new features outlines include security and government features. Being that this is a roundup of features introduced over the last two months, they should all be live.
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