Since the turn of the year, Microsoft Teams has gone from being a standard collaboration tool, to an industry-leading one-stop shop for any business, or any group of friends.
Working alongside Microsoft 365, Teams has made remote working more of a pleasure than an inconvenience, with features ranging from 250 person chat rooms, to recurring surveys.
Let's discuss what's new in Microsoft Teams:
Group calling expanded
You can now operate conference calls with a 7 x 7 display of participants, meaning you can have up to 49 people showing their camera on the call. Not only this, but you can have as many as 250 people involved in a single audio group call.
Teams has implemented the ability to both record group calls, as well as giving you the option to "raise your hand", something that will be pretty transformative to schools and universities, where students may have previously sent a message to ask to speak - The former could be hard to pick up as message notifications are only temporary.
What's more, you can allow complete immersion into the office (Visually, at least), by customising your background via the desktop application. Simply select a picture from your files and add it as your background. This is one of the more entertaining aspects of the calling updates...
Scheduling meetings and locating messages has got a whole lot easier
Teams has upped its ability for users to incorporate meetings. Users can schedule meetings and have the reminders sync up to their other applications within the rest of their 365 setup. Reminders will display in Teams, and these can be customised by colour, department etc, so you can categorise who the reminder is for, e.g. H.R.
Message history is much easier to locate now, with the option to search chat history in a single channel or conversation. Simply by hitting Ctrl+F, users can search individual channels for old messages. Other options include setting date brackets, locating messages where your name was mentioned (@user), and searching for attachments such as Excel/Word files, as well as images and videos.
You can download Teams here - There is a free version, as well as the paid version for if you want to sync Teams with other Microsoft 365 services.
