Microsoft has published a blog post announcing several new features for Microsoft Teams! I would like to go into some of them one more time! I think most of you will have already seen it last week when Microsoft posted the official blog post, but let me summarize briefly what was announced, what I think and what I found on social media. Microsoft has published a blog post announcing several new features for Microsoft Teams! I would like to go into some of them one more time!

“Reimaging virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning.”
I think it could not have been more appropriately titled!

First of all, it’s about the meeting experience as we know it, the “Together mode” brings us even closer together in meetings and integrates us into a view, so to speak. I am curious how this will look like! The release will probably be in September 2020.*

An update that I am personally looking forward to is the “Dynamic view.” I have often caught myself jumping back and forth between the person’s view and the shared content. With this feature, this should be over, and I can decide which content should be displayed and combine them. The rollout will probably be in September 2020.*

It is not easy to design meetings in such a way that participants are included, but with two updates, it will be a lot easier! “Live reactions” brings the reactions we already know from the chat into our meeting in an animated version. In addition, the conversation will be more present in “Chat bubbles,” and it will no longer be so easy to miss messages. Both features will be released most likely in December 2020.*

Furthermore, the number of participants in meetings is drastically increased. From 300 participants up to now, we jump up to 1.000 active participants. Active participants? No, don’t worry – the silent attendees are not automatically kicked out! Nevertheless, in the future, it will be possible to invite additional passive participants into the meeting and thus welcome up to 20,000 participants in view-only mode. This makes the classic team meetings interesting for webcasts and larger company-wide meetings. I’m really looking forward to testing this; the view-only mode could be interesting for smaller meetings, it remains to be seen if this will be an option that the organizer can use without the overflow. This feature will be released in December 2020.*

One thing that I have been struggling with personally lately was the digital whiteboard. In remote workshops, it’s simply not to be imagined without it, but I was still missing a few functions. Whiteboard now gets a complete update with new features but also a faster performance. Beside sticky notes, there are more texts and drag and drop possibilities. The updates to Microsoft Whiteboard may be released in September 2020.*

I personally think this is going to bring a lot of value to the meetings people are using day to day. Even though these are just announcements, it does show that Microsoft is really taking on its competitors in the online meeting sector. I am really looking forward to both, using it in my daily work but also to present these to customers and users!

If you can not wait to improve your online meetings right away take a look at Matt Wade’s Definitive Guide To: Rockstar Meetings in Microsoft Teams where I contributed as well! You can find it here!

*All release dates are crawled from the Microsoft Roadmap, LinkedIn posts and TechCommunity posts – these are not confirmed dates!