To mark the occasion of its second birthday, Microsoft Teams has been enhanced with additional features for the benefit of its users.
The collaboration tool that ships free with Office 365 will feature a series of updates designed to make for more effective and inclusive meetings with an increased emphasis on security, according to Lori Wright, general manager of Microsoft 365.
Beneficial features for collaboration and communication
With today’s trend of more employees working from home than ever, Microsoft has added a helpful feature to Teams which allows users to customise their background to a more office-like environment or present their company branding behind them when they are on screen.
Support will now be made available for extra USB cameras in place. Via the Intelligent Capture tool, Teams will be capable of delivering improved images and text on whiteboards, so those viewing remotely can benefit.
A new feature for the whiteboard in Teams will create an unlimited area that participants can make use of for collaboration. This feature will grant users the ability to take work on a physical whiteboard and transpose it onto the digital board in Teams without having to redraft content.
In addition to the 44 languages Teams already supports, Microsoft has announced a further nine will very soon become available. Speakers of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Filipino, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada and Gujarati will now be catered for.
Teams will also be capable of live captions – especially beneficial to participants with varying language fluency and those who are hard of hearing. To begin with, these captions will only be on offer in English, but a longer list of languages is soon to follow before the close of this year.
An expansive update to Teams will afford users the ability to compose live events by way of interactive conversation discussions and video throughout Teams, Yammer or Stream. Entitled ‘Live Events’ in Microsoft 365, this powerful feature will enable 10,000 participants to join together from their individual locations in real time on a device of their choosing. They will also possess the option to catch up on demand at a time that better suits them via artificial intelligence features.
Access control and improved security
After popular request, users will also now be able to discriminate what information can be accessed by individual team members, such as files and conversations. This useful tool allows content to be filtered without a need for the creation of separate groups. Additionally, users can put limitations on communication with information barriers.
For enhanced cybersecurity, Microsoft has stated it will provide Teams communication with Data Loss Prevention (DLP). This will give customers the ability to monitor and guard sensitive information in Teams conversations, allowing administrators to stop sensitive material being improperly shared outside of the company.
If your company is interested in the benefits of collaborative software from Microsoft to improve communication, get in touch with our team at WM Reply – specialists in business solutions utilising the latest Microsoft technology.