As Microsoft continue their development of their Microsoft 365 app, Teams, at a pace it can be hard to keep up with what's new, so our latest blog will tell you what new features have been announced in July 2020.
7x7 Gallery View
If you've noticed the increase to a 3×3 view showing 9 on screen recently, then you’ll be delighted to hear Microsoft are now upping the number to 49 participants (7x7) on a single screen. The new feature will be previewed this month with general availability coming soon.
Breakout Rooms
You may be familiar with Breakout Rooms in Zoom which allow meeting organisers to split their event into smaller groups for networking for example, well Teams is now following suit and we even found a great vlog on them, click here to view it.
As for the functionality, Teams handles this by assigning participants (either through automatically directing people or by prompting them to join) into a set number of rooms. In addition, organisers can jump between meetings (on their own or by request of a participant), provide announcements to the individual rooms, and they are able to recall everyone back to the meeting at any time.
The feature is currently being rolled out and will be fully operational at some point later in the year
New “Meet Now” in Channels
With the latest update, you can now locate the “Meet Now” button in a channel’s header in the top right-hand corner and launch your channel meeting from there.
Schedule Meetings on the Free Version of Teams
Users using Teams for free also get some added features in the lastest update, they will now be able to schedule meetings and send out invites in advance. And there are 3 different ways to share your meeting invitation:
- Share by copying the meeting invitation
- Share via Outlook
- Share via Google Calendar
Right now there isn't a time limit on meetings for the free version of Teams.
Priority Notifications
Microsoft has gone ahead and made priority notifications one of the core features, this gives you the ability to continually send notifications that will repeat every two minutes for up to twenty minutes on any message marked as urgent.
Survey Templates
As home working has become the new normal and many of us aren't yet back in the office Microsoft received feedback that Teams users were looking for an app that enables them to send surveys to their employees.
Following that feedback, Microsoft has designed templates to help teams create and share surveys in their channels. The templates have been designed with the following in mind:
- Employee well-being
- Employee issues and challenges
- Employee health status
You can read more about the survey templates right here.
Teams and Microsoft 365 continues to evolve so keep an eye out on our blogs here and credit to Microsoft for use of the images.
In the meantime if you need help with any Microsoft or Windows products please get in touch with the team at Affinity.
