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.

1. 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.
    
2. 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.
    
3. 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.
    
4. 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.
    
5. 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.
    
6. 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.
    
7. 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.
    
8. 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.