Breakout Rooms, Meeting Recap, Improved Search: Microsoft To Bring A Host Of New Features On Teams App

Microsoft has announced a host of new features that users will get in the coming days on the Teams App.

New Delhi: Microsoft has on Tuesday announced new features for its video conferencing app Teams to help users have a better experience on it. 

The team membership is currently limited to 5,000 members but eventually, it will be increased to support up to 25,000 members per individual team, the company said.

In October, the breakout rooms feature will let meeting organisers divide participants into smaller groups so that brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions can happen.

Users can choose to switch between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and/or close them all to bring everybody back into the main meeting.

"With the new Together mode scenes coming this year, you can transport your team to a variety of settings that can help set the tone and create the experience for your meeting, whether it be an auditorium, a conference room, or a coffee shop," the company said during the ‘Microsoft Ignite 2020' virtual conference.

Then later this year, custom layouts will bring a more diverse content viewing experience and enable presenters to change how content shows up for others during a meeting. For example, when a member 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.



Microsoft revealed that later this year, it will provide an option for a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more that can be shared automatically in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting.

The recap will also be available in the meeting event in the Outlook calendar.

"For more structured meetings such as customer webinars, organisers can use event registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance. After the meeting, a detailed reporting dashboard will help understand attendee engagement," Microsoft announced.

There is going to be a streamlined view that displays contacts, voicemail and calling history at once, making it easier to return a call with a single click.

A new search experience, powered by Microsoft Search, will make finding messages, people, answers and files faster and easier.



"This redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 services," the tech giant announced.

Also, new personal well-being features like a virtual commute, integration with apps like Headspace, and an emotional check-in experience will be available in the first half of 2021.

For a more secure platform, Microsoft will let customers add a layer of encryption using their own keys, similar to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

"Customer Key for Teams is targeting public preview before the end of this calendar year".

Developers will soon be able to integrate their apps into Teams meetings and create scenarios that have a deep awareness of the meeting context – including roster, roles, and permissions, Microsoft wrote.

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