Microsoft Teams Celebrates Enterprise Connect Win with 8 New Features
Written by Cisilion’s CSO, Rob Quickenden
Microsoft Teams has won ‘Best in Show‘ for the second year in a row at this week’s Enterprise Connect event in Orlando. The recognition comes for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce. This week also marked the second anniversary of the launch of Microsoft Teams!
Microsoft also announced eight new capabilities in Teams that will make collaboration even more inclusive, effective, and secure.
The Eight New Features Explained…
1) Customised Backgrounds with Intelligent Blur
Released later this year, these take the existing intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call. This improves the effectiveness of remote meetings by encouraging the use of video while minimising distractions.
2) Content Cameras and Intelligent Capture
Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms will leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard.
3) Long Awaited Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams Meetings
Provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. With upcoming support for Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams Rooms, in-person attendees can also contribute. You can even add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation. This is currently in public preview.
4) Live Captions & Subtitles
These aim to make Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location. Similar to the recently released functionality in PowerPoint, this will improve meeting effectiveness by allowing attendees to read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion.
5) Secure Private Channels
One of the most loudly requested features, this allows Teams to customise which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility. This is one of our top requested features and we’re excited to be actively testing this internally and with select customers.
6) Information Barriers
Avoid conflicts of interest within your organisation by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in First-line Worker scenarios. This is particularly helpful for organisations that need to adhere to Ethical Wall requirements and other related industry standards and regulations.
7) Full Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Chats & Conversations
Enabling customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations. By creating DLP policies, admins can help prevent sensitive information from unintentionally being shared or leaked – either inside or outside of the organisation. This is now generally available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance.
8) Live Events in Microsoft 365
Enabling anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer and can be as simple or as sophisticated as needed. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time from anywhere, across their devices, or catch up later with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) features, such as automatic transcription, to unlock the content of the event recording.
Your Next Steps – Get In Touch With Our Experts
To find out more about Microsoft Teams or start your Teams journey, register for our Modern Workplace Innovation Centre Experience and speak to our experts on how our Microsoft Gold Partner status can enable your business to benefit from the full range of features available in Microsoft Teams.