
Microsoft Teams’ eight new and upcoming features
Microsoft Teams has won the Best in Show award at Enterprise Connect on the week that marks the second anniversary of the solution’s worldwide launch.
The company is in the process of adding eight new collaboration capabilities to Teams that will roll out over the coming year.
- Customised backgrounds allow 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.
- Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analogue whiteboards. Using a USB camera, Teams Rooms can 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.
- Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together including in-person attendees. Add content from a physical whiteboard onto the Whiteboard canvas without having to recreate it from scratch. Choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely.
- Live captions and subtitles make 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. Attendees can read speaker captions in real-time, so they can more easily stay in sync and contribute to the discussion.
- Secure private channels for customising which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. Restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams.
- Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organisation by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other. This helps limit the disclosure of information by controlling communication between the holders of information and colleagues representing different interests, for example, in Firstline Worker scenarios.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables 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.
- Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver communications to employees, customers, and partners. Live events use video and interactive discussions across Teams, Stream, or Yammer. Up to 10,000 attendees can participate in real-time, or catch up later with AI features such as automatic transcription.
Citrix closes $2.25b deal to acquire Wrike, empowers modern work models
Microsoft launches industry clouds for nonprofit, manufacturing & financial sectors
Strong fourth quarter for Zoom in wake of COVID crisis
Microsoft study reveals improvement in digital civility
Microsoft Viva: Microsoft unveils new employee experience platform
Barracuda introduces new backup platform to protect data in Microsoft Office 365

Cyber-pandemic: The most notable cyber attacks of 2020
2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic saw employees move to remote working, keeping IT professionals on high alert for cyberattacks.

NICE rolls out agile workforce management for distributed workforces
Agile WEM is a way in which organisations can virtually connect their workforces in one location.

Shields up: surprises are the new normal
Mimecast Connect: The what's what of cybersecurity in 2021.

Gartner reveals latest forecast for government IT spending
Worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $483 billion in 2021, an increase of 5.1% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner.

Palo Alto Networks turns attention to supporting remote workforces
"We’re working with more organisations to pivot their security architecture and move towards a cloud-delivered security model that can safely connect any user, to any application, from anywhere.”

Hands-on review: Jabra Elite 75t earbuds
They retail for around half the price of the AirPods Pro but can compete with them in every way.