Last March, Microsoft Teams , the tool designed to improve communication and collaboration of the work teams of companies, completed two years. To celebrate its anniversary, Microsoft published an image with numbers that demonstrate the spectacular degree of adoption that the Office 365 tool is taking worldwide.
During all this time, Teams has been evolving significantly, both in new capacities that take advantage of Artificial Intelligence, and in the use by customers ((Today more than 500,000 companies use it) making it the central tool of communications smart in Office 365 , as well as a perfect teamwork space that unites large collaborative services of the platform such as SharePoint Online, Planner, Stream, Forms, Power BI, etc …
In this article we are going to review the most outstanding news and those that will come during this year.
Smart communications
In the middle of 2017 Microsoft surprised us with the announcement of the merger between Skype Business and Teams with the aim of gradually turning Teams into the main client for the “Intelligent Communications” in Office 365.
With this new vision, the company intends to offer a single tool that allows communication tasks to be completed in a more effective way, with the minimum change of context, allowing its users to participate in more productive meetings and organizing daily communication much better.
The future of meetings
Combining communications, collaboration and intelligence can control the entire life cycle of an online meeting:
- Before a meeting , Teams will discover relevant documents and useful information about the participants to help you prepare the meeting.
- During the meeting , the conversations will be recorded, transcribed into text, translated, and a time code and speech recognition will be added, which will allow each person to be associated with what they have spoken at the meeting.
- After the meeting , the recording in the cloud and the transcript of the dialogue will be added to the channel so that they are available to all team members.
New communication capabilities
From this announcement Microsoft has been improving the communication capabilities in Teams by introducing Skype business features such as:
- Scheduled meetings
- Outlook calendars.
- Call functions (including incoming and outgoing calls to PSTN numbers).
- Waiting functions, call transfers and voicemail.
- Waiting room for the meeting for the participants.
- Unified presence states between Teams and business Skype (Available, busy or on a call).
- Incorporation of business Skype contacts to Teams.
- Interoperability between Business Skype and Teams (allowing users of the two tools to communicate).
- Joint administration center for Microsoft Teams and Skype Empresarial in Office 365, to facilitate the management of IT departments.
- You can make recordings of any meeting and leave them stored in Teams team. In addition to automatically, you can transcribe the voice to text and encode the meeting times and dialogues so that members can then read the subtitles, search the conversation and play part of the meeting.
- Blur background video to blur the background in a video call so that attendees focus on the person speaking and not on what is behind it.
When the merger is complete, Microsoft Teams will become the central tool of intelligent communications in Office 365 , as well as a perfect teamwork space that will continue to unite large collaborative platform services such as SharePoint Online, Planner, Stream, Forms, Power BI, etc …
Access to guests
During the past year a new capacity of the tool was launched that allowed access to people outside the work team. However, the requirement to be invited was to have an Azure Active Directory account (Azure AD). Now, the ability to Access Guests is extended to anyone with a professional or personal account such as Outlook and even Gmail.
New ways to interact with applications
Get access to a personal view of your apps
The new personal applications space allows you to easily access the applications you use the most and see the elements you have assigned. In this way, we can easily access our appointments in Planner or access our notes in OneNote.
Here you will also find the “Who” function, a new application with Microsoft Graph technology, with which we can search for contacts in your organization and obtain information from them.
Discover applications for Teams in the new Store
Search and discover new applications and services in Teams is now easier with the new “Store” section. Teams offers its users a new catalog of applications to extend the user experience. Thanks to its wide range, all users can find platforms with which to streamline their different tasks. Also, teams has included a search by names and categories to find the most accurate solution instantly.
Agility to work in teams thanks to the commands
Through the commands, located in the top bar of the Teams screen, you can ask questions to navigate directly to the answer you need . The variety of actions you can carry out is very broad, just by typing the parameters ” / ” or ” @ ” in the command box, the menu will be displayed showing actions such as adding users, changing our status, going to a channel of determined, call a partner and much more.
With the parameter “@” you can find what you need With the parameter “/” you can execute actions on computers
Microsoft is working on future functions such as creating tasks for project management. Thanks to this new function the command bar will show us a list of actions that we previously have assigned to the applications that we use the most.
Teams and the GDPR
Through the Office 365 compliance and security center we can now establish retention policies for the Teams created, which will help us to comply with the security requirements and the new European data protection regulation (GDPR).
We can apply retention policies to the entire organization, to specific users or Teams, and decide proactively whether to conserve content or delete content from conversations, chats and channel messages.
The novelties that come during this 2019
Next, we talk about the innovations that will come along this 2019 and that continue with the vision of Microsoft to improve the intelligent communications of the tool:
- Custom backgrounds: Bring the background blur technology that includes Teams one step further, allowing participants to select what they want to be seen after them in video calls, such as the company logo or an office environment when working from home.
- Cameras of content and intelligent capture in the meetings : Very soon an additional camera can be used to capture content. For example, if in a meeting that is being carried out through Teams, a brainstorming is performed and the information is recorded on an analog board, remote users who are not in the room can take advantage of the new smart capture processing from Microsoft to obtain, focus, resize and improve the images and text of the board.
- Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams: Provides an infinite digital canvas for participants in meetings through Microsoft Teams to work directly together. Thanks to this integration of Whiteboard in Teams , which Microsoft plans to launch soon (it is already in public preview version), all those attending a meeting through Teams can contribute and actively participate in the conversation.
- Live subtitles : That make the Teams meetings more inclusive for the assistants who are deaf, who have hearing problems that have different levels of proficiency in the language in which the meeting is taking place, or that are found in a place with a lot of noise that prevents them from listening correctly. Microsoft has announced this new improvement for Teams, which allows attendees to read the captions of the speakers in real time and thus improve synchronization between them. (The preview version in English will be available shortly).
- Secure private channels: Allows you to customize which team members can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict participation and allow access to the channel when necessary, without having to create separate teams to limit visibility.
- Prevention of data loss (DLP): In chats and conversations allows customers to detect, automatically protect and monitor the confidential information that is shared in these channels. By creating data loss prevention policies, administrators can help prevent confidential information (such as credit card numbers, Social Security data or health records) from being shared or leaked involuntarily, either inside or outside the company. the organization. (Now available in all Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans that include Office 365 Advanced Compliance).
The improvements and new capabilities of Microsoft Teams position the Office 365 tool as the main one within the business collaboration.
Do you want to know more about Teams and Office 365?
If you want to know more about Teams and the rest of the applications that make up the productivity and collaboration suite in the Office 365 cloud, contact us.