As we near the end of the month, Microsoft is once again sharing the updates made to Teams over the past few weeks. As per usual, the list of updates is huge and spans meetings, chat, and other collaboration tools in Teams.
Starting with meetings, there are a couple of new viewing modes. Dynamic view is one of them, and it dynamically adjusts the layout of the meeting to adapt as more users join, speakers change, or content is shared. There's also Presenter Mode, which allows a presenter to be shown next to a presentation, or overlaid on top of it while presenting. There are also improvements to content sharing during meetings, with a new menu that makes all the options like PowerPoint Live presentations more readily available.
Meeting organizers also now have the option to turn off the camera for other attendees and set break room timers so rooms close after the timer ends. There are also some platform-specific updates. On macOS, you can now share your computer sound when sharing your screen, and AI-based noise suppression is also now available, though Apple M1 Macs aren't supported right now. Meanwhile, the web version of Teams now supports 2x2 and 7x7 gallery views for meetings, as well as Together Mode.
There are tons of other improvements, including a new participant list with search support, intelligent question suggestions and support for multiple-choice answer quizzes with Microsoft Forms, custom attendee registration pages, and the ability to block downloads of non-channel Teams meeting recordings.
Moving on to calls, there's a new calling experience that makes contacts more readily accessible in a single view, support for merging calls with both 1:1 and group calls. Microsoft is also expanding Teams calling plans to more countries including New Zealand, Singapore, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, Norway, Slovakia, Poland, and Luxembourg. Finally, there's now support for Office Branch survivability meaning users can continue making PSTN calls with Teams phones if the Office Branch loses connection.
Onward to chart and collaboration, Teams now supports group chats with up to 250 users from different organizations, making cross-company collaboration easier. Microsoft has also added new wellbeing experiences to Viva Insights in Teams, and finally, Adobe Sign integration has been added to the Approvals app.
For education users, there's now support for supervised chats so teachers can oversee conversations between students. It's also now possible to add assignments to your Outlook calendar by syncing the Teams calendar. Finally, there's a new Career Coach app meant to help higher education students discover their career path and achieve their goals.
For frontline workers, a new integration between Teams and Dynamics 365 can help retail workers manage tasks across different stores, assign tasks, and so on. There are also new tag APIs that make it easier to reach specific users based on their role shift, and others.
For government users, breakout room timers are also available now, as are polls in Teams meetings. You can also create team templates, both provided by Microsoft or custom designed by IT admins. Finally, data loss prevention now covers Teams chat and channel messages, including private channels. You can also now set policies to block sensitive information from being shared on Teams.
Finally, Microsoft also had some news for Teams devices. Teams for mobile devices can now cast from their phones to a Teams Room running on Windows without having to set up a formal meeting. There are also new Teams-certified devices including Crestron Flex Teams Rooms devices (MM30, B30, M50, and M70), the Yealink MVC840 Teams Room system, and Poly Voyager Focus 2 headset.
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