Microsoft announces new set of new capabilities for Microsoft Teams

At the Ignite conference, Microsoft announced that Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history and also announced new set of features and capabilities for Teams. The following features are now generally available to all Teams customers. 

• Background blur: Now, all Teams customers can remove distractions and focus your video on what matters most. Available today. (You are welcome, BBC Dad.)
• Meeting recording: Meetings are no longer just a point in time experience. With meeting recording in Teams, you or other invitees who missed the meeting can playback recorded audio, video and content at any time. Pull up a transcript, powered by Microsoft Stream, and search for keywords so you can optimize your time while getting caught up. Available today.
• Cloud video interop – Bring your existing room technology investments into Teams. Through partner offerings from Polycom, BlueJeans and Pexip, a full portfolio of legacy devices can now be full-fledged audio/video participants in Teams meetings with content sharing. Polycom’s CVI offering is available now, with Pexip and BlueJeans generally available by end of October.
• Home is a new mobile experience that allows firstline workers to see at a glance the most important and relevant info for their day. With Home, firstline workers can clock in and out of shifts/breaks, receive important notes for the day or shift, find out who is working during the shift and save time by easily reviewing information and schedule.
• Shifts enables firstline managers to plan schedules in an employee self-service and integrated experience. They can create, update and distribute schedules for teams as well as broadcast open and unfilled shifts so that other employees can cover them. Finally, they can review and accept time off requests and swap shifts – all from mobile. For firstline employees, they can swap/offer shifts and request time off, right from their phones.

With Home and Shifts coming to Microsoft Teams, the company will be retiring StaffHub on October 1, 2019.

Microsoft has also announced two new secure messaging features for Teams. These are specifically designed for the Healthcare system and will allow doctors to communicate and share without risking privacy. The new features are in private preview and provide integration with electronic health records (EHR). The new features will allow doctors to monitor and share data related to patients in real time. Moreover, the new features support HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance and will allow doctors to communicate without risking privacy.

• Image annotation – capture images, annotate, and share them on a secure platform. IT Admins can set policies to prevent images from being stored on a mobile device or local drive.
• Priority notifications– alert the recipient to an urgent message and automatically notify the recipient every two minutes for up to twenty minutes.

These new features will roll out to Teams commercial customers by the end of this year. You can read and learn more about these new on Microsoft’s Tech Community website here.