A closer look at several features recently added to Microsoft Teams

As the large-scale work-from-home experiment resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the world, the modern workplace doesn’t strictly have to be a single, static setting. In fact, the word ‘workplace’ can now often be seen as making the most sense in a digital context.

Hence the emergence of corporate communication apps like Microsoft Teams, which more than 330,000 companies across the globe now use, according to Microsoft. Key to the appeal of Teams is the regularity with which it is updated, as these relatively new additions attest…

The assigning of seats in Together mode 

When using software like Teams, it can be a challenge to make participants in a virtual meeting feel as though they are in the same physical space as everyone else taking part. However, Teams tackles this problem by offering what is called Together mode.

When you are using Together mode to organise a virtual meeting, you can now assign specific virtual seats to individual attendees.

You can now pop out shared meeting content into a separate window 

The core functionality built into Microsoft Team includes that of sharing files within the chat window, allowing your co-workers also on Teams to clearly see that content.

However, if you are a longtime Teams user, you might have previously found it tricky during virtual meetings to load other people’s files in the app while still keeping sight of the other participants.

Fortunately, it is now possible to pop out shared meeting content into a separate window so that you can easily see both those participants and the content itself at the same time.

Compatibility with telephony from a third party 

Whether you want to remotely collaborate with other members of your team by voice or instead video, either option can be made available to you — and provided to a high standard, too — when you arrange for a telecoms firm to enable this functionality in your Teams setup.

Microsoft Teams telephony is the new way of collaboration on Microsoft Teams, and can be provided by a business-focused telecoms company such as Gamma.

The option to create and send short video clips in chat 

Sometimes, you could find yourself struggling to decide between a text-based chat and a video chat. What if you want to combine elements of both?

There is one new feature that makes it easier for you to do that. Now, when at the chat window, you can produce what Microsoft marketer Holly Lehman has described as “short, lightweight, rich video clips” and send them in chat.

At the time of writing, this particular feature is limited to the Teams desktop environment — but, according to Lehman, “will be in public preview in mobile by end of the year.”

A more detailed view of your call history 

You can discern how to work more efficiently and productively once you have dived into the part of Teams that lets you see how previous calls arrived, whether they were transferred or forwarded, and the manner in which they were controlled after they were received.