Breakout rooms, custom layouts and meeting recap coming to Microsoft Teams later this year

At Ignite 2020, Microsoft announced several new features coming to Microsoft Teams. These new features will make meetings experience even better on Microsoft Teams. Read about the features below.

New Together mode scenes:

Back in July, Microsoft announced Together Mode feature that uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place meeting participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting or class. Today, Microsoft announced several new Together mode scenes that are coming later this year.

• Auditoriums
• Conference rooms
• Coffee shop

Microsoft also announced that it will use machine learning to automatically scale and center meeting participants in their virtual seats, regardless of how close or far they are from their camera, creating a more realistic visual experience.

Custom Layouts:

Microsoft today announced that custom layouts is coming later this year. This new feature will allow presenters to customize how content shows up for participants during the meeting. For example, as you can see from the screenshot above, when a presenter is showing a PowerPoint slide, participants will be able to see the presenter’s video feed transposed onto the foreground of the slide they’re showing.

Breakout rooms:

One of the most requested Teams features, Breakout rooms, will be available next month. A meeting organizer can split up participants into smaller groups based on the requirement. And presenters can hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and close the rooms to return everyone to the main meeting.

Meeting recap:

After a meeting gets over in Microsoft Teams, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files, and more will be automatically created. The recap can also be accessed in Outlook calendar by going to the meeting event. In the future, meeting recordings will be automatically stored as files in Microsoft SharePoint so they can be shared easily with others.

Increased meeting participant limit:

Microsoft Teams meetings will now support up to 1000 participants. For larger meetings, Teams will now support up to 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience that includes the ability to use live captions. Advanced Communications plan subscribers can use this feature.

Source: Microsoft