What’s new in Microsoft Teams – December 2021

Microsoft published a December 2021 monthly round-up of all the features added to its Teams collaboration service. This time, the biggest improvements are end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support, Teams Rooms updates, a new SIP Gateway service, Teams-certified devices and more.

New features for Microsoft Teams meetings

First, Microsoft has made some improvements to Teams meetings. For presenters and organizers, the app has added a new feature that allows them to view the order of hands raised in a meeting. It allows meeting organizers to quickly identify participants who want to speak without interrupting the flow of conversations. To use this feature, users must go to the meeting controls and click on the Participants pane.

The meeting recording feature in Microsoft Teams gets new features, including a multi-speed playback option, high-quality transcriptions, indexed recordings and an auto-expire policy. Organizers can also enable an automatic recording option for Teams meetings.

Chat and collaboration features in Microsoft Teams

The following are chat and collaboration features in Teams. Microsoft Teams is now rolling out an update that allows users to add descriptions to images shared in private or group chats. To do this, right-click on the image and then select the “Add Alt text” option. The new feature makes Teams messages more accessible to people with disabilities, who can now use screen readers to easily understand the full content of messages.

Security and compliance

On to the security and compliance department. Last month, Microsoft announced that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support is generally available for one-to-one Teams calls. However, some advanced features (such as call transfer, recording, live subtitling and transcription) are not available in E2EE calls. It is up to IT administrators to manually enable and manage the E2EE feature for all users in their organization.

New government positions

For government customers, breakout room manager support is now available in Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High) and Department of Defense (DOD) tenants. The new feature allows meeting organizers to extend management to specific presenters in breakout room settings. These managers can perform various operations such as assigning users to rooms, adding/deleting rooms, setting timers, sending announcements and much more.

Updates and devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms

Microsoft has released a number of new features and capabilities for Teams Rooms on Windows, including notifications about meeting room capacity. If a meeting room is over capacity, the app can now send alerts to participants in the meeting room based on data stored in the account. There is also a new feature that allows the video gallery to be split across multiple screens when content is not shared during Teams meetings.

Last but not least, Microsoft has introduced a new SIP Gateway service that allows organizations to use existing third-party SIP phones with Microsoft Teams. The company also unveiled some new Teams-certified devices, including Jabra PanaCast 20 and Poly Studio Room Kits.