Office 365 Updates for the Week of March 23rd
WolfPack, this week Microsoft will again be introducing several new updates for Office 365. These updates will include a great feature for Teams and an improved browsing experience for SharePoint on mobile.
Multi-Windows Chat for Microsoft Teams: Multi-Window Chat is a new Microsoft Teams feature which enables users to multitask more efficiently by popping out their chat conversations into separate windows.
Once this feature has been enabled on a user’s Office 365 tenant, users will be able to engage in chat sessions in windows outside of the Teams client. So how will this work in practice? First, there are several ways that a user can pop-out their conversations:
- Double-click on a conversation in the chat list.
- Clock “Pop out chat” from the context menu for a chat in the chat list.
- Click the ‘Pop out’ button in the top-right corner of the chat header.
- Use the slash command /pop
Box brings new integrations to Microsoft Teams and Outlook: Box has introduced new integrations for Office 365 customers this week. The cloud storage company is set to launch integrations with Microsoft Teams, along with a new add-in for Outlook on Android and iOS.
Teams - Expected to be released on March 31st, the new Teams integrations will enable users to access and share Box content directly in Teams channels or chats. All channel content will be available with the new Box Files Tab. In addition, team deployment will be available with automated folder creation and permission mapping between Box and Teams.
Mobile – The Box Add-in for Microsoft Outlook will now support saving email attachments to Box for both Android and iOS. This integration enables users to open, edit and save Box files directly within the new Office app.
Raise hands in Teams Meetings:
The new “raise hands” feature in Teams allows meeting attendees to identify that they wish to speak, making it easier to actively participate in large meetings. Everyone will see a visual cue on the attendee’s video feed, as well as in the participant list, and can be sure to give them the room to participate in the conversation at hand.
Background Blur for iOS Teams App:
Keep the focus on you and not what’s behind you! You can expect to see this feature appear on your iPhones and iPads in the coming weeks.
Noise Suppression in Teams Meetings:
Whether it be ambient noise from a café, noisy typing in a conference room, or construction noise outside your home office, unwanted background noise can be quite distracting in your Teams meetings. Noise suppression is a new feature in Teams that will automatically remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings.
Microsoft will soon deliver real-time noise suppression to Teams meetings and calls, and noise suppression is now generally available for recorded video content in Stream.
Noise suppression works by analyzing an individual’s audio feed and uses specially trained deep neural networks to filter out noise and retain only the speech signal. While traditional noise suppression algorithms can only address simple stationary noise sources such as fan noise, Microsoft’s AI-based approach learns the difference between speech and noise, and is able to suppress all forms of noise including non-stationary sources that we commonly encounter in our meetings such as typing, eating chips, and road noise, just to name a few.