Microsoft announces bold features in video meet app Teams

Seattle, Sep 22 (IANS) Microsoft on Tuesday announced several new capabilities to help people stay connected, collaborate and build solutions in its video meet app Teams.

While there isn’t a limit on the number of people in a Teams tenant, team membership is currently limited to 5,000 members. Later this year, it will be increased to support up to 25,000 members per individual team, the company said.

Coming in October, breakout rooms will allow meeting organisers to split up participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions.

Presenters can choose to hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and/or close the breakout rooms that then bring everybody back into the main meeting.

“With the new Together mode scenes coming this year, you can transport your team to a variety of settings that can help set the tone and create the experience for your meeting, whether it be an auditorium, a conference room, or a coffee shop,” the company said during the ‘Microsoft Ignite 2020′ virtual conference.

Coming later this year, custom layouts will allow for a more dynamic content viewing experience and enable presenters to customise how content shows up for participants during a meeting.

For example, when a presenter is showing a PowerPoint slide, participants will be able to see the presenter’s video feed transposed onto the foreground of the slide they’re showing.

Microsoft said that later this year, Teams will have the option for a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more that can be automatically shared in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting.

The recap will also be available in the meeting event in the Outlook calendar.

“For more structured meetings such as customer webinars, organisers can use event registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance. After the meeting, a detailed reporting dashboard will help understand attendee engagement,” Microsoft announced.

Microsoft Teams will have a streamlined view that shows contacts, voicemail and calling history at once, making it easier to initiate or return a call with a single click.

A new search experience in Teams, powered by Microsoft Search and available late this year, will make finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive.

“This redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 services,” the tech giant announced.

Also, new personal well-being features like a virtual commute, integration with apps like Headspace, and an emotional check-in experience will be available in the first half of 2021.

In an effort to strengthen security, Mcrosoft will enable customers to add a layer of encryption using their own keys for Teams, similar to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

“Customer Key for Teams is targeting public preview before the end of this calendar year”.

Developers will soon be able to integrate their apps into Teams meetings and create scenarios that have deep awareness of the meeting context – including roster, roles, and permissions, Microsoft said.

–IANS

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