During Microsoft’s Ignite event, the company announced a series of updates to its Teams platform.

Avatars:

Mesh avatars are now available as private previews for Microsoft Teams meetings.

These avatars offer flexibility and choice in how users appear in a Teams meeting, with a customized, animated version of themselves, eliminating the need to turn on their camera.

The Avatars app from the Microsoft Teams App Store allows users to design up to three unique avatars.

Microsoft Teams Premium:

The company is introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, an add-on that will be available in preview in December. The goal is to make any type of meeting more personal and secure.

Features include meeting guides to help users choose the right meeting experience. These include manuals for customer calls, a brainstorming meeting or interaction with help desk support. Users can brand their meetings with custom logos and backgrounds for the Teams lobby.

Teams Premium features also include an “intelligent summary” that gives users personalized meeting highlights to help them discover information that is most important. This way, even if users miss a meeting at work, they will still be caught up on what happened.

Users can also replay the meeting and receive automatically generated chapters to easily navigate through the recording and help them understand the content of a meeting discussion.

Teams Premium also provides live real-time translations in captions for 40 spoken languages.

Finally, security features include advanced meeting protection that makes it easy to secure confidential meetings, such as board meetings or financial discussions.

Teams Premium features will be rolled out in December 2022 as part of the Teams Premium preview, with general availability in February 2023. The availability of new AI capabilities, such as intelligent meetings, will be rolled out in the first half of 2023.

Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile:

Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile, now generally available, is an enterprise mobile calling experience offered in partnership with telecom operators.

With Teams Phone Mobile, Microsoft Teams is integrated with a user’s native dialer on the mobile device, allowing users to use their cell phone as they always do, while allowing the organization to enable business calling features and policies on these mobile devices. Calls move across networks and devices without interruption and can also be converted from mobile networks to Internet-based video calls in Teams.

Teams Phone Mobile is now available from Rogers in Canada and Telia in Sweden. Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, BT and Swisscom will be launched soon, with more operators expected to join.

New chat and collaboration features:

Video clips are now widely available and offer a more personal touch and strengthen connections. Users can record, send, view and reply from desktop or mobile. The recipient of the video clip can play the video in their chat and reply with a chat message or their own video clip.

An upcoming feature called Expanded Reactions allows users to respond and express feedback in a more creative way with more than 800 Teams emojis. Comprehensive responses will be generally available in November.

Other features include delete-chat functionality, suggested responses and the ability to schedule messages

Microsoft Places:

Microsoft Places is a new workplace app that optimizes spaces for hybrid work. The app uses intelligence to optimize where work happens in hybrid work, connecting virtual and physical spaces to encourage more connections, engagement and productivity.

The Microsoft Places app provides a dashboard view of the days when people in the team or collaboration network are in the office, and offers a feature that indicates people’s physical location (office, remote or mobile).

The app also shows users the workspaces that other users have booked, so someone can book one nearby if necessary.

Updates to teams platform for developers:

Teams Live Share SDK (software development kit) allows developers to turn any app, when shared in a Teams meeting, into a real-time collaboration experience for multiple users.

Teams Live Share SDK features include addition of Canvas tools that allow participants to mark meetings in real time with virtual pens, markers and highlighters, and the ability for developers to publish their Teams Live Share apps globally.

Extension of Teams apps to Outlook and Office:

Using the Teams 2.0 JS SDK announced at Microsoft Build 2022, developers can build production apps that extend Teams pages and message extensions to Teams, Outlook and Office using a single app and deployment model. These apps can run on Win32 and Web versions of Microsoft 365, with an example of app availability on Android devices.

Teams Toolkit in Visual Studio:

Microsoft Teams Toolkit is now part of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Developers can now use Visual Studio to build rich, collaborative apps that work in Teams and can extend Teams app experiences to Outlook and Office.com as well.

Source: itworldcanada