Microsoft Teams: New Features Unveiled at Ignite 2021

At the Microsoft Ignite 2021 event – once again delivered as a digital event experience this November – Microsoft has announced some innovative new features for Microsoft Teams that aim to make remote and hybrid working a smarter, safer and collaborative experience. 

Let’s take a look at some of these brand new features: 

New User Experience Features in Microsoft Teams Meetings

There will be new updates available in early 2022 to the Teams meeting experience to foster more inclusive and productive hybrid meetings, including improved support for those using mobile devices as well as the ability to mute notifications and pin or hide your own video features to avoid Teams meeting fatigue. You can also ensure that all voices are heard by seeing the order of raised hands in a meeting to improve meeting management – especially useful for large meetings.

New Immersive Meetings with Mesh for Microsoft Teams

Using Mesh for Microsoft Teams allows users to create personalised 2D and 3D avatars, negating the need to turn cameras on as users can make conversations interactive and express themselves with live reactions with their new avatars. New spaces have been introduced that look like physical spaces, such as conference rooms and networking areas to foster those all so important water-cooler connections that we’ve been missing. Available early 2022, Mesh enabled experiences in Teams will provide users with more flexibility and choice in how they connect and collaborate across the organisation.

New Webinar and Broadcasting Capabilities

We’re really excited about the updates to the Microsoft Teams webinar and broadcasting capabilities. These include a virtual green room where organisers and presenters can socialise, monitor chat and Q&A, as well as manage attendee settings and share content before the event starts. There’s a useful webinar co-organiser feature for up to 10 co-organisers where they can have the same capabilities and permissions as the organiser, enabling them to do multiple tasks such as manage meeting options, create polls, and control audio settings. There is also a new Q&A experience which will enable more structure for both open and moderated meetings. All these enhancements make it much easier to set up and deliver professional, engaging experiences to both internal and external audiences.

New Chat, People and Presence Features

Another exciting feature that we are looking forward to using is the chat with self feature, providing users with a dedicated space to write drafts, capture quick ideas and record reminders– helping you stay organised and avoid sending incomplete messages accidentally. 

With the addition of over 800 new 3D emojis to choose from, users can now express themselves more authentically, and can add many more new reactions to messages. Another funky new feature is the ability to delay the delivery of messages, so you can select a specific time to send a message. This is great when working with people in different time zones, so you can get faster responses to messages, while being considerate of your colleagues’ schedule.

Security and Compliance in Teams

Compliance and lifecycle management plays a big part for us here at ProvisionPoint, so we are delighted to see that Microsoft Teams remains committed to delivering enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities to manage the lifecycle of Teams content to better protect and govern data. From co-authoring encrypted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, creating retention and deletion policies for Teams private channel messages as well as the ability to segment users per business compliance needs and restrict collaboration and communication between segmented users, is great news for compliance managers and IT Security teams.

Platform Enhancements and New Collaborative Apps

We will also see new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Teams bringing new valuable insights and processes to users, Azure Communication Services Teams interoperability, which allows you to extend the meetings experience into other apps and processes as well as a new Teams + Power Platform experience where you can create collaborative apps for your organisation and seamlessly distribute them in Teams.

Is your Team ready for the new Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is adapting fast to the new ways of working around the globe. There are many more exciting innovations unveiled at Ignite 2021 for Microsoft Teams that promote collaboration – which ones are you looking forward to working with?