Microsoft adds features to Teams that improve virtual collaboration

Redefining the future of work and education is the objective of the update that has been made to this collaboration tool. The aim is to get people to stay connected and discover new ways to be productive from anywhere..

Microsoft has added new features to its Teams collaboration tool to make virtual interactions more natural, participatory and human.

These features offer three key benefits for the work environment and education. First of all, Help people feel more connected to their team and reduce fatigue from video calls. Besides, make meetings more inclusive and participatory. Y, finally, They simplify work and save time.

Among the new features that Microsoft has incorporated into Teams, stand out:

Together Mode – Makes meetings more interactive, since it helps to focus on the face and body language of other people and allows you to capture non-verbal signals.

Dynamic View – This feature makes it possible to view up to 49 people in a meeting at the same time and allows organizers to divide participants into smaller groups.

Video filters – These are used in photography and social media applications, and now they have joined Teams. Before joining a meeting, Users can use the filters to adjust the light level and decrease the camera focus to customize their appearance.

Reflect Message Extension – Provides company managers and teachers with a simple way to communicate to find out how their teams and students are feeling.

IT administrators can install the Reflect extension from GitHub and then make it available to employees in the Message Extensions menu.

More participatory and productive meetings

Live Reactions – Non-verbal cues, like smiling or nodding your head, can be difficult to capture in virtual meetings, which prevents presenters from perceiving the audience's reactions, or participants in large meetings to share their opinion without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

It is a shared feature with PowerPoint Live Presentations, allowing the audience to provide immediate feedback to the presenter.

chat bubbles – Until now, Teams users had to manually open the chat window to see the conversation screen, Conversations sent during a meeting will now appear on the screen of all participants, so chats will become an integral part of the conversation.

Designation of the person speaking, translation for real-time captions and transcriptions – Although Teams offers real-time captions that keep you up to date with what is being said in a meeting, Speaker designation will be added soon so that, in the subtitles, indicate who is speaking. after a meeting, the transcript file will automatically be saved to the chat tab of that meeting.

Interactive meetings for more than a thousand participants – There are times when it is important to gather a large group of people for meetings or university classes. Teams expands to support up to a thousand participants. However, Sometimes it is necessary to gather more people to see a presentation, so it will support this type of meeting experience for up to 20.000 participants.

Updates to Microsoft Whiteboard

Tasks app – The Tasks app in Teams offers a new unified view of tasks in Microsoft To Do, Planner y Outlook.

Suggested answers – Suggested responses in Teams chat use Assistive Artificial Intelligence to create short responses based on the context of the previous message.

Cortana in Teams – Use AI and Microsoft Graph to offer voice assistance, Coming soon to the Teams mobile app. These voice assistance experiences are delivered through Cortana Enterprise Services, with the same privacy commitment, security and regulatory compliance that Microsoft 365. It will be available in the Teams mobile app on iOS and Android.

Microsoft Teams screens – Organizations must allow their employees to adapt more productive remote work spaces, as they prepare to return to the office. To help them, Microsoft launches the Teams screen, a new category of all-in-one devices’ that incorporate a touch screen and a hands-free experience through Cortana.

Lenovo ThinkSmart View will be the first Microsoft Teams display to ship, while Yealink will also be one of the first devices in this category.

Contactless meeting experiences – Teams allows people to join meetings and share content from their own mobile devices or personal computers. Microsoft announces that it will also enable these capabilities on Surface Hub.