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At the start of the pandemic, Microsoft saw a huge surge in people using Teams, as businesses across the world had to abruptly move to home working. A year on, the platform has seen millions of new users (over 115 million people now use the platform daily) and it has since formed an integral part of many businesses’ digital transformation projects.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has since prioritised updates and features to the platform. For those of us who now view Teams as an essential workplace tool, this is great news, as it becomes more intuitive, streamlined and integrated with each update.

However, it can be hard to keep afloat of all these new features, and to figure out which ones may actually be useful for you and your organisation. In this blog, we’ve done that work for you, and covered our top 7 new features of Microsoft Teams since the start of the year.

If you’d like more information about Microsoft Teams – including how to set up meetings, teams and channels – take our look at our Microsoft Teams guide:

Our Essential Microsoft Team Guide

1. Breakout Rooms

Breakout Rooms are a new feature of Microsoft Teams that allows the meeting host to move participants into smaller groups. This can be useful for facilitating brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions.

If you’re the meeting organiser, you will see a new icon in the meeting controls panel.

By clicking on the icon, you’ll be able to set how many breakout rooms you’d like, and who you’d like in each. You can choose to assign people manually or allow it to randomly select attendees for each group. Once the breakouts have started, you can (as meeting organiser) join any of the breakout rooms, contribute to any of the room chats, and send announcements to everyone.

To see a step-by-step guide, take a look at Microsoft’s support page on Breakout Rooms.
 

2. Meeting recaps

Teams now provides a recap of Teams meetings so participants and non-attendees can review a meeting once its ended. A recap including the meeting recording (if this was switched on for the meeting), transcript, chat, shared files, and more are automatically shared in the meeting chat tab and viewable in the details tab of the meeting invite. Organisers will also find the attendance report here.

3. Approvals

Approvals is a brand-new app within Teams that allows you to streamline requests and processes with colleagues, rather than you having to send an email or chat message. Within the app, you can create requests, view ones sent to you, and access all past requests from one place.

Want to find out more about Approvals? Microsoft have created a video to help you get these set up.
 

4. Start a Teams meeting instantly from Outlook

 You can now join Teams meetings using your calendar in Outlook for Windows. Just as you would in Teams, open your calendar in Outlook – you will now see a “Meet Now” button in the top ribbon. Select it to open a Teams meeting to get a meeting link or invite participants. A simple feature, but one that helps save you time and effort!

5. Present a Live event via iPad

It’s not just the desktop version in Teams that’s getting new features - it is now possible to present events via your iPad. As the presenter on an iPad, you are currently able to chat with other presenters, share your video, share your screen and invite other attendees to join as presenters. Go to Microsoft’s dedicated support page to see a full list of technical specifications and capabilities/limitations.   

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6. AI-based noise suppression

Use one of three noise suppression levels in Teams to minimise distractions and help keep meeting participants focused. This feature will automatically remove unwelcome background noise during your call or meetings, using machine learning to learn the difference between clean speech and noise.

To switch this on, click on your icon in the top right corner of the Teams screen and go to Settings, then Devices. Here you will see a Noise Suppression section, where you can choose the level of suppression – low, high, or off. It advises that you use Low if you want people to hear music but have a play around and see what works best for you. 

7. Publish a company-wide task list

It’s now possible to create and track work for your entire organisation with the new task publishing feature in the Tasks app. The Tasks app is a task management tool within Microsoft Teams that integrates individual tasks powered by Microsoft To Do and team tasks powered by Planner in one place. It is available as an app within Teams or as a tab within a Teams channel.
 
Admins and managers can get full details on task publishing by going to Microsoft’s Tasks support page.
 
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