Teams is Microsoft"s premier online collaboration and communication tool for enterprise and personal users. The company regularly adds new features to this software to retain existing customers as well as entice new ones. We recently learned that the Redmond tech firm is adding default 3x3 video view support for Teams meetings in Edge and Chrome, and the option to schedule offline meetings. There are several other features currently in development too.
According to recent additions to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, Teams on desktop and the web will gain the ability to provide and view ratings and reviews for apps available in the Teams storefront. This should make it easier for customers to determine if an app is worth their time or not, and leave feedback directly for the developer too. This capability is slated for July 2023.
Yet another useful feature coming in July is the ability to rename yourself prior to joining a meeting, regardless of your tenant-configured name. Microsoft says that this will enable "flexible representation" across different meetings.
Additionally, an interactive two-way lobby chat is being implemented. It will arrive in June and will allow meeting facilitators to easily communicate with customers prior to them joining a meeting. Moreover, starting from May, Teams Rooms devices that are compatible with Windows 11 will begin to receive the OS-specific release. Incompatible devices will continue to be supported through Windows 10.
While most of the aforementioned features are months away, there are a couple of capabilities that will be arriving in the coming weeks and months too. In April, Teams customers will receive some Activity feed improvements. Microsoft has described them as follows:
We"re improving visibility for when a time-sensitive urgent task is published to a team. When an organization publishes a task with a priority set to "Urgent", each member or owner of the team that receives this task will receive a notification in the Activity feed informing them that an urgent task was published to their team.
Prior to this, two new features are expected to be rolled out within this month. The first one is automatic reminder emails for webinar attendees one hour before the event kicks off. Meanwhile, the second will interest Teams admins and IT admins who will be able to see usage and adoption metrics for various Teams apps.