More you say? Wasn’t it only 6 weeks ago when Microsoft announced a raft of new features to its flagship communication and collaboration tool, Teams? At Microsoft Ignite last week a flurry of further features were announced. Below are a few of our favourites…

Together Mode

We now use Together Mode as standard for our large team meetings, we find it a much more relaxed view. At this stage, only the auditorium mode has been available to NZ users of Teams. However new Together mode scenes are coming this calendar year. You will be able to transport your team to a variety of settings that can help set the tone and create the experience for your meeting, including a conference room or a coffee shop.

 

 

Custom Mode

Custom layouts will soon 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breakout rooms

One of the challenges of virtual meetings is that only a single conversation can happen at any time thus making collaboration difficult.  In the physical world, we’d break out teams out into small groups to enable active conversation. In a virtual world that hasn’t been possible, until now. In October Microsoft Teams will introduce breakout rooms which will allow meeting organisers to split up meeting 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. Breakout room functionality is common to other communication tools like Zoom. It’s great to see that Microsoft is addressing this feature gap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Webinar registration and reporting

As webinar producers, we’re pretty excited about this! Until now we’ve had to retain Zoom in our technology suite as while Teams Live is excellent for large online meetings,  the webinar registration and reporting features offered by Zoom were absent.  For us, it will mean we can deliver large scale webinars within our standard technology set (Microsoft 365) with the security benefits that Teams provides. These new features are expected to begin to roll out by end of the year.

 

Microsoft Teams has the ability to revolutionalise the way you work with your team through its collaboration and communication features, all while maintaining world-class security. If you’re interested in learning more about Teams, subscribe to our monthly newsletter or talk with our team today.