Microsoft Teams: The New Features for 2021

A New Look at the Employee Experience at Microsoft Ignite 2021

At the Microsoft Ignite 2021 digital event, Microsoft announced a fantastic array of exciting new features for Microsoft Teams, all dedicated to reshaping the employee experience in a hybrid workplace.

With secure communications at the top of the agenda, these Teams innovations are designed to deliver enhanced presentations and powerful meeting experiences for a world of working from anywhere.

Let’s see what these new Microsoft Teams features are.

Bring virtual meetings to life

With Dynamic View, meeting elements are automatically arranged on the screen when people join, turn on video, start speaking, or start presenting in a Microsoft Teams meeting, to provide an optimal viewing experience.

And the new View Switcher lets you control how you see meeting content, such as placing video feeds at the top of your meeting window, making it easier for you to have a more natural view of others, or even hide all video feeds to remove distractions and establish the full attention to the content of the shared meeting.

Now you can make your videos and presentations really impressive with the funky new Presentation Mode. Presenters can silhouette video feed to the shared content and even place content over your shoulder as a visual aid — just like a news reporter — to give your presentations a truly professional look.

With the release of Microsoft PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, presenters can now confidently conduct meetings with access to notes, slides, chats, and participants, all in a single view. Participants can also navigate the content privately at their own pace or using the screen reader.

Wow factor webinars

Microsoft Teams will soon support interactive webinars for up to 1,000 participants, including expanded presentation options, live responses, and moderation controls for chat, audio, and video. With a customizable registration process and automatic email confirmation, you can provide all guests with a smooth visitor management and registration experience. Combined with the new attendee reporting capabilities coming later this quarter, you can create custom reports to measure the success of an event.

Also available this month are the 10,000-person broadcasts, with teams scaling seamlessly to accommodate a 10,000-person broadcast.

Other announcements include the new integration of Teams events with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to provide a robust attendee management process to effectively nurture attendees before, during, and after an event.

Improved chat and collaboration

We’ll also see the introduction of Microsoft Teams Connect, an accessible, shared workspace for both internal and external contacts where anyone can chat, meet, call, share, and co-author documents in real time. Administrators gain access to granular controls, giving their organization control over how external users access data and information.

The Teams mobile app is getting a new look, with new headers, icons, and style, along with some additional updates, including the ability to open Teams files offline, a new search experience, and the ability to pin chats for an improved mobile experience. phone experience on Teams. These features are coming to iOS first, followed by Android.

Security, Compliance and Privacy

As more of us work remotely, secure communication and compliance are paramount. Microsoft Teams will soon support end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for ad-hoc 1-to-1 Teams VoIP calls, providing an additional option for making sensitive online calls. To help customers meet data residency requirements, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo is expanding this spring to include Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to specify where their Teams customer data is stored, down to the team and the end user.

This year, team admins will be able to view and evaluate the security, compliance, and data privacy details for apps coming from Microsoft Cloud App Security. This helps team admins save time on security assessments and enable more targeted selection-based security specs, resulting in better app quality.

Last month, Microsoft enabled guest access by default to simplify an inclusive meeting experience. This month, Microsoft is adding scheduled access reviews by default for guests across all teams and groups. The system automatically schedules periodic guest access reviews within Teams to streamline the guest user management experience and provide better identity security.

Devices & Display Developments

With the ability to see all participants clearly while sharing meeting content, the new gallery views in a team space are designed to make everyone feel like they belong and provide a better meeting experience for participants.

Other new Teams view features include the ability to change your background, express live reactions, and show applause, humor, appreciation, and other emotions. You can now even ask Cortana questions like “What time and what time is it in New York?” using speech in the Lenovo Thinksmart View.

And by using intelligent speakers for Microsoft Teams rooms, you identify and differentiate the voices of up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams room, allowing participants to use the transcript to track or record actions.

We all work differently and these innovative new features and capabilities from Microsoft Teams are poised to address these new ways of working.

Source: provision point