Microsoft Teams added video quality enhancements and more in May

We are at the end of May and Microsoft is sharing some of the improvements it has made to Teams over the past month, as it often does. As usual, there is a lot of news, but many of the new features are spread across different devices or specific types of users.

One of the more notable improvements has to do with video quality, as Teams has added a new lighting correction feature, so if you are standing in front of a bright background, Teams can ensure that you are still visible during a meeting or video call. In addition, there is a new soft blur option to slightly smooth out your video feed, creating a sort of bokeh effect.

As for meetings, Microsoft has also added the ability for meeting organizers to force the together mode for each meeting participant. This view ensures that people in the meeting are displayed together in a virtual space instead of separate video feeds. Until now, you could only turn it on for yourself, but now you can make it so that everyone has a similar view.

Another new feature is the ability to send meeting invitations in two languages at once, so if you are working with people from different countries, you can make it easier for them to respond to the request and participate in the meeting. Meeting participants can now also choose which status to display when they are in a meeting, such as whether they are free, busy or out of the office. Also on the language front, Microsoft has enabled suggested answers on mobile in many new languages, including Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew and more.

Other updates include new changes to the Approvals app, allowing administrators to request comments when an application is approved. You can now also export your personal approval information to an Excel file if you want to keep a personal record of that information. There are other new management features, such as the ability to customize the home page in the Team Management Center, improvements to the app usage report and activity log, and the ability to view the external app ID on the Manage Apps page.

Teams Rooms devices have also received a number of upgrades, including a new gallery view that displays meeting participants horizontally when the meeting stage is used to present or share content. It is now also possible to use Direct Guest Join for Zoom meetings in Teams Rooms with an Android device, although this feature is only available on the Poly Studio X30 and X50 Teams Rooms devices.

n speaking of devices, there are a few new Teams-certified devices this month, including the Logitech Zone True Wireless earbuds, the Huddly L1 camera, Yamaha’s ADECIA Tabletop SOlution and the Shure Digital Signal Processor. For frontline workers, the Microsoft Teams Walkie-talkie feature is now supported on Crosscall devices.

Much of the news announced today are existing features that are now enabled for specific users, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. Users on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 or VMware can now benefit from multi-window support, and the first two platforms now support background blurring during meetings. VDI for VMware users now have support for dynamic emergency calls, and VDI for Citrix now supports the ability to give and take control during a presentation, allowing participants to take control of what the presenter is currently sharing (with the presenter’s permission).

Meanwhile, government users also have a few new features in tow, including support for together mode when using Teams on the Internet, presenter mode, the ability to remove your video feed so you can see yourself clearly, and high-fidelity audio mode, aka music mode. Government users can now also participate anonymously in meetings across clouds and choose default apps to open files shared in Teams. Finally, government users can now use live subtitles in Teams meetings on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix.

Source: xda-developers