What’s New with Microsoft Teams – February 2021

Approvals in Teams

Approvals in Microsoft Teams enables everyone, from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees, to easily create, manage, and share approvals directly from your hub for teamwork. You can quickly start an approval flow from the same place you send a chat, in a channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. Just select an approval type, add details, attach files, and choose approvers. Once submitted, approvers are notified and can review and act on the request.

Offline autosend

The offline experience for Microsoft Teams chat and channels helps you to continue be productive even without a network connection. Offline autosend identifies when Teams messages are sent or edited while the user is offline. These messages are automatically sent once the device is back online.

Include up to 10,000 users in an org-wide team

Create an org-wide team to promote collaboration and communications across the entire organization. Administrators who manage tenants that have less than or equal to 10,000 members can now create an org-wide team, which automatically syncs all the tenant’s members with the team.

Meeting chat moderation settings

Meeting organizers and teachers can now choose from three chat settings to help create a safe and inclusive meeting environment. Chats can be “Disabled”, preventing the organizer and participants from using the meeting chat. Alternatively, they can be set to “Only during the meeting”, allowing participants to send messages only during the meeting and the organizer to send messages at any time. Lastly, the default will be set to “Enabled”, allowing chats for all meeting attendees at any time.

Add a shared calendar to a Teams channel

Create and share a calendar with members of a specific channel. When a channel meeting is created, Teams automatically creates a new post in the channel’s activity feed. Users, who have notifications turned off, will see the event only when they open the channel’s calendar. Once a channel event is posted, you can add it to your personal calendar. This feature provides all members within the channel, except guest users, visibility to upcoming events.

Add a shared calendar to a Teams channel

Create and share a calendar with members of a specific channel. When a channel meeting is created, Teams automatically creates a new post in the channel’s activity feed. Users, who have notifications turned off, will see the event only when they open the channel’s calendar. Once a channel event is posted, you can add it to your personal calendar. This feature provides all members within the channel, except guest users, visibility to upcoming events.

Microsoft Teams Secure Score recommendation

We are happy to announce our first security recommendation for Microsoft Teams on Secure Score is now available!

Multi-Window Chat

You are now able to pop out individual Teams chat conversations into a separate window, to help them streamline their workflow and more easily move between ongoing conversations. Available in GCC and GCC-High.

Multi-Window for Meetings and Calling experiences

Multi-window experiences are coming to Teams meetings and calling. Users will have the ability to pop out meetings and calling into separate windows to help them optimize their workflow. These experiences can be turned on directly within Teams for PC and Mac clients.

Meeting recordings saved to OneDrive and SharePoint

You can now save Microsoft Teams meeting recordings to OneDrive and SharePoint. This provides improved sharing capabilities, basic governance, automatic retention labels, and more.

Simplified way to manage your channel notification settings

Through the teams and channels list or from the channel header, the users can quickly manage their channel notification settings by the means of a new fly-out design. Users can turn on all activity on or off with a single click or diving deep into custom to set their preferred permutations.

To find out more about Microsoft Teams offerings, call us on 0114 303 0249 or email [email protected].