Microsoft Teams: New Features – February 2021

I have already established that Are you ready for Microsoft Teams? since you need to collaborate and organize your processes efficiently, especially in the context of work from home.

In December we discussed new features that Microsoft Teams brought. Features like: Noise Suppression, Appear Offline, Teams Templates or Advanced Meeting Settings. Since then, a series of interesting features have been launched that we thought we would share with you.  

1. New templates for Together Mode. 

The Together Mode feature has been around for a while now. It's about how during a meeting, participants appear together in a virtual environment. In the meantime, Microsoft has added several scene templates to choose from for an even more enjoyable experience: 

2. Pop-up apps. 

If until now we could separate conversations from the Teams window in a pop-up, Microsoft added the functionality to detach other applications, such as the Planner application: 

You can now Alt+tab between different Microsoft Teams windows, increasing efficiency and reducing the time spent navigating between items. 

3. The possibility of adding a personalized calendar for each channel. 

This way you can more easily organize the activities specific to a particular department or project.  

4. Time left in the meeting 

A notification that alerts you 5 minutes before the end of the allotted time for the meeting. This simple notification can help you stay on time and ensure you don't miss the next event or have time to prepare for it. 

5. Power Point presenter view directly in the Microsoft Teams meeting: 

An extremely useful feature if you have to give a presentation. You no longer have to worry about sharing the wrong screen, you have the participant chat and the presentation in a single view, along with notes related to the current slide.  

6. Raise hand – more emoticons 

7. Breakout rooms  

The functionality to create one or more breakout rooms within a meeting is finally here! An extremely useful functionality especially if you are organizing an online workshop/training and need to divide users into multiple teams. Also essential functionality in the educational sector.  

Plus, plenty of useful controls to assign users, depending on the breakout room you want, which you can easily navigate between as an organizer. 

What's next: 

Among the functionalities that will be launched, the following caught our attention: 

• Updates related to search in Microsoft Teams. This update promises more accurate and faster indexing of results using AI. 
• The ability to measure the number of people registered vs. participants in a Teams meeting.  
• Registration page to more easily manage participants in an online event, both before and after it has taken place.