What's new in Teams?
The latest useful Teams features, and some we heard are coming soon
Have you taken a look at the Teams roadmap yet? Or voted for a feature to be developed? Our article, Influencing the development of Teams, has useful information about how you can make a difference. Even if you haven’t had time to participate, Microsoft’s developers continue working hard to make Teams run smoothly and add new features. We’ve listed a few things we think you’ll find interesting below.
New features
- Improved video and audio - tweaks in the background to improve your experience
- Improved transcription - now available, just download the transcript when your meeting or event ends
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‘What’s new’ in Teams button on the home page (bottom left) - all the latest features and even short ‘how to’ videos
- Insights tab is now available. This feature uses Delve - a powerful way to show search results and documents for content you own or that is shared with you, focusing on content you access and edit the most.
Coming soon
- Teams meetings auto scale to 10,000 participants – auto scaling will occur as ‘view only’ access after the first 300 participants join, automatically becoming a Live Event
- Persistent break out rooms - useful for online events
- Sharing email to Teams directly from Outlook
- Work to improve the mobile experience of Teams
- Webinar support is expected during May, offering the chance to produce professional webinars for business and teaching, bringing more features to Teams for smoother presentations, lectures and ‘show and tell’ sessions
- Allowing anonymous presenters in Teams Live Events - Useful for presenters outside the organisation who do not want to share their accounts/sign-in details with other participants
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Multiple Spotlights – will highlight more than one person in a meeting at a time (for co-presenting etc.)
- Third-party electronic signatures to allow document signing within Teams using trusted providers
- More emojis and reactions will be available – yes, there’s fun stuff too!
Read about ways you can use Office apps with Teams in Microsoft’s own words.
Teams for telephone calls
Did you know that Teams has functionality for making telephone calls?
Our Nexus365 colleagues conducted a trial to see how Teams telephony might work with our existing telephone system, Chorus. On balance, the systems worked well together, although some features, such as hunt groups, couldn’t be extended between the two systems.
Adding telephony features to Teams comes with a cost for each user, but the needs of your unit may make this worthwhile. Local IT support staff colleagues interested in implementing telephony in Teams can find out more in the Training and workshops channel in the Nexus User Group Team.
Teams training, help and advice
If you have a question about good practice for teaching with Teams, please contact the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) or check the CTL website which has lots of useful information.
But if you are after how to use the tools offered as part of the Teams software package, don’t forget you can join one of our courses to find out how you can get the most out of this versatile tool. Just search for ‘Teams’ in the course listing on our IT Learning Centre what's on page.
To see an excellent Teams Q&A section and the latest announcements, any member of Oxford University can join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG). You'll also find tips, tricks, quick start guides and more. The joining code is LNJVOFR.
Top tip
To see the latest updates and find out how to use them, click the ‘Help’ button at the bottom left of your Teams screen and choose the ‘What’s new’ option. This takes you to all sorts of useful information and training!
