Microsoft has announced a slew of new features for Teams and cross-app collaboration features that it says will be useful for hybrid working.
Office Excel benefits from the Excel Live feature to allow real-time collaboration on Excel content within a Teams meeting. Excel Live joins PowerPoint Live for Teams, and Microsoft says more live collaboration features are coming to other Microsoft software.
Microsoft also said it’s bringing a video clip feature to Teams Chat so users can record and share short clips.
More channels
Teams Connect, an intra- and inter-organizational collaboration feature for Teams channels, will also be available this month. It provides a shared space so users from different organizations don’t need to switch tenants to collaborate on channels. This feature is useful for joint venture companies and large enterprises with subsidiaries or recently merged organizations.
Microsoft has made improvements since the Shared Channels preview in March. It increased the number of channels from 50 to 200, with 200 standard channels, 30 private channels, and 200 shared channels per team.
The company has also improved app creation tools for shared channels, and now allows rich messages to be sent to external users, including GIFs and emojis. Administrators also benefit from better reporting on user activity.
Teams for webinars
For those using Teams for webinars as part of a hybrid mix for tasks such as training or customer meetings, Microsoft has rolled out a new webinar management experience with additional custom options. A public preview is scheduled for August.
When configuring a webinar, the user can define it as an internal or external webinar. Users can add additional presenters and designate up to 10 co-hosts who can help facilitate the meeting. Users can post more detailed information about speakers presenting a webinar, including their professional photo, company, title, LinkedIn profile, social media accounts, and brief biography.
Microsoft said a new structured question and answer experience will make it easy for organizers to moderate the conversation and give attendees a “seamless” way to ask questions and interact with speakers. Organizers can manage and moderate questions and answers as they come in, and choose which questions to post or reject.
Strengthen collaboration
At the other end of Teams, there’s “Chat with self” for those who want to store notes or stay organized within Teams. It can be used for drafts and to send files to each other.
Microsoft has also integrated LinkedIn with Teams so users can see their LinkedIn contact details from Teams chats, channels, calls and meetings. This feature is now generally available.
And as Microsoft announced earlier this month, Teams users can link existing or new chats to their Dynamics 365 records. This reduces the need to switch apps for those using Dynamics 365 as a sales tool. Teams is currently in public preview and will soon be generally available.
Microsoft is also promoting its Live Share concept as one of its collaboration features. It is aimed more at application developers and is based on Microsoft’s Fluid Framework. Live Share was announced in May as a tool that lets apps go beyond simple screen sharing to more immersive collaboration. It’s been in preview ever since, and today it allows “developers to make any app collaborative within the Teams meeting.”
Source: ZDNet.com