Microsoft Teams gets a massive update, adds numerous new features

Microsoft recently brought a massive change to its Teams video collaboration service. There were changes and improvements both in terms of features and cosmetics. These deal with meetings, calling, chat and collaboration along with the introduction of a a new section called “App spotlight”.

The first major introduction in Meetings and Calling section is Live captions with speaker attribution. This lets you see who is speaking along with what’s being said. Being a presenter, you can also pin an individual video feed for all attendees during the call. The pinned individual will be the main video shown to all participants. This feature is limited to PC, Mac, mobile and Microsoft Teams on Windows. A presenter can also prevent others from unmuting during the meeting and enable certain participants to unmute when they raise hands. This will specifically be important for digital classrooms and conferences.

In addition, you get Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode in Teams. You can even let others to edit. The meetings and call recording can also be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, so you can share it with others in future.

In case you want to know how many participants joined the meeting, you can now download a participant report after the meeting within the meeting chat. The firm has added a new data into the report that allows you to better manage your attendance.

Also read: Microsoft has a big refresh for Windows 10 coming in with Sun Valley

The Spotlight Support feature in Microsoft Teams Rooms lets you (meeting organiser) select a video feed as the spotlight for all attendees. This will become the main video shown to all participants.

In Chat and Collaboration section, Teams can now allow you to pin any message in a channel. This will appear in the channel’s information pane for all members of that channel. In case you are offline, you can let other know about it by changing the status. And in case you write different messages in different languages, there will be a spell check according to that language for your ease.

Besides a new File Sharing experience and an updated SharePoint pages app, the service can let you choose a template while creating a new Team.

Microsoft is also introducing some feature to make it more relevant for education purposes. The firm brings Anonymous Grading. Here, the student’s names are anonymised while grading and avatars are temporarily removed. In addition, the platform makes it easier to view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or across all classes.