Thanks to the demand for work-from-home, we’ve all become very used to using Microsoft Teams. We love the way it combines all our messaging, phone calls, conferencing into one, we love the way it works on all our devices and we’re adding smarts with various ‘bots into it.
As with all Microsoft products, it keeps evolving. Over the last few months, we’ve got used to seeing the menus change a little in Teams calls. We’ve seen virtual break-out rooms added to conference calls, more controls around audio and cameras and so on.
Ultrasound howling detection
What a name! Despite that moniker, it’s going to be huge! It’s going to save us in that situation when there’s a bunch of people in a meeting room, using Teams together, and someone turns on Teams on their device and suddenly everyone is subjected to a barrage of feedback and echo. With “ultrasound howling detection”, Teams will realise what has happened and automatically shut down every mic and speaker in the room except for the person talking. Anyone else joining the room subsequently will automatically have their mic turned off as well.
Insights on Profile Cards
Profile cards are the boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over people’s names in Outlook and Teams. Microsoft are adding to this. If the information is available in LinkedIn, then Teams will pull that into the card and tell you about birthdays and recent career changes. It will also look into Outlook and give you a heads-up on pending meetings with that person
ChatGPT / Premium
ChatGPT has grabbed the headlines. It clearly changes the game for research. Now it’s coming to Teams via the new Teams Premium. It wil recap meetings with notes and tasks,and annotate videos. If you use Teams to create content for training, such as induction, this will make a huge difference. There is a lot of new functionality in this premium version of Teams including branding uniformity so all your people present your organisation consistently. . Check out : Microsoft Teams Premium: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity | Microsoft 365 Blog
Others
We also note comments around improvements coming to live captions in Team Meetings and Explicit Consent for recordings.
Check the full roadmap yourself, you can find it here – Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365