Microsoft Ignite - Teams Announcements

New Together mode scenes
Together mode reimagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart.
New Together mode scenes can transport your team to a variety of settings and create the appropriate experience for your meeting.

New custom layouts
Coming later this year, custom layouts will enable presenters to customize how content shows up for participants during a meeting. For example, when a presenter is showing a PowerPoint slide, participants will be able to see the presenter’s video feed rearranged to the background.

Breakout rooms
Coming later this month for Targeted Release customers, breakout rooms will allow meeting organizers to split up meeting participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions. Presenters will be able to move between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakrooms, and/or close the breakout rooms that bring everybody into the main meeting.

Meetings recap
Meeting recaps help teams stay on track after a meeting for both participants and for those who were unable to attend a meeting. Coming this year, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more will be automatically shared in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting. The recap will also be available in the meeting event in your Outlook calendar.

Webinar registration and reporting
For more structured meetings, such as customer webinars, meeting organizers can use event registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance. And after the meeting, view a detailed reporting dashboard that will help understand attendee engagement. These new features are expected to begin to roll out by end of year.

New Calling experience
Coming later this year, we are simplifying the calling experience with a streamlined view that shows contacts, voicemail and calling history at once, making it easier to return to a call with a single click.

Teams templates
Teams templates, now generally available, help a team get started faster and be more effective. Choose from common business scenarios, such as event management or crisis response, and industry-specific templates, like a hospital ward or bank branch. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, apps, and guidance. Administrators can also create custom templates for your organization, helping you standardize team structures, reveal relevant apps, and scale best practices.

New channel Info pane
Rolling out now, the channel info pane provides an at-a-glance summary of active members, important posts pinned by members, and other relevant information in each channel. This is great for new members getting up to speed or existing members who want to stay in the know. Microsoft is also making creating new channel conversations versus replying to existing ones more intuitive with the new conversation button.

New Search results experience
A new search experience in Teams, powered by Microsoft Search and available late this year, will make finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive. This redesigned search results page provides better context and faster results, with AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.

25K member teams
Currently there isn’t a limit on the number of people in a Teams tenant, but team membership is limited to 10,000 members. Later this year Microsoft will increase this to support 24,000 members per team

Wellbeing and productivity insights in Teams
Wellbeing features and productivity insights – powered by MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics – are coming to Microsoft Teams starting in October. Individuals, managers, and business leaders will get insights personalized to their role with recommended actions to make changing habits and improving productivity and wellbeing easier. Additionally, new personal wellbeing experiences including a virtual commute to add structure to your remote work day and Headspace guided meditations to help you unwind will be available in the first half of 2021.

SharePoint Home site in Teams
The new home site app brings the power of the SharePoint home site and an organization’s intranet directly into Teams to give employees a gateway to their organization’s intranet, with customizable naming, branding and multi-level navigation to teams, communities and resources. Coming later this year, the app name and icon match the brand for the users organization and can be pinned to the app bar in Teams, providing quick access to search and a personalized view of news and important sites.

Security and compliance

Customer Key Support – At Microsoft Ignite, Customer Key support was announced for Microsoft Teams. Microsoft already keep Teams data safe by encrypting it while at rest in Microsoft datacenters. Now this capability is being extended to enable customers to add a layer of encryption using their own keys for Teams, similar to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive. Customer Key for Teams is targeting public preview before the end of this calendar year.
Microsoft Graph API for Teams Data Loss Prevention - Earlier this year Microsoft announced the public preview of the Microsoft Graph Change Notification API for messages in Teams which enables developers to build apps that can listen to Teams messages in near-real time enabling DLP scenario implementations for both customers and ISVs. Additionally, the Microsoft Graph Patch API allows applying DLP actions to Teams messages. Microsoft Graph API for Teams DLP in now in general availability.
Microsoft Graph API for Teams Export - Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) for Microsoft Teams is a key scenario for our customer as it allows them to solve for retention, indexing, eDiscovery, classification, and regulatory requirements. The Teams Export API allows the export of Teams Messages (1:1 and group chat) along with attachments (file links and sticker), emojis, GIFs and user @Mentions. This API supports polling daily Teams messages and allows archiving of deleted messages up to 30 days. Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams Export are available in public preview now.

Teams management improvements

Organizational branding for custom business Teams app catalog - Later this year, IT Admins will be able to customize their Teams custom line-of-business app catalog using their organization's branding. This will enhance the user experience for end users and increase organic discovery and use of an organization's line-of-business apps.
Bulk policy assignment - Policies allow administrators to efficiently control the Teams features available to their users, now administrators can apply policies in batches of up to 50K users.
Delegate device management admin role - Microsoft recently introduced a new delegate device admin role that can only view and manage the devices section in Teams Admin Center. This allows Global Admins to restrict and control the permission of managing other Teams Admin Functions.
ARM64 Native Teams App – Microsoft will soon release a native ARM64 Teams client that provides improved performance and reliability on ARM devices.

Power Platform and custom development

Meetings and extensibility with apps in meetings - Developers will soon be able to integrate their apps into Teams meetings and create scenarios that have deep awareness of the meeting context – including roster, roles, and permissions. New meeting interfaces, such as meeting tabs, in-meeting side panel, and content notifications will enable developers to provide end users with a richer meeting experience. More than 20 launch partners who have been integrating these new extensibility points in their Teams apps and will be ready for use when it becomes generally available in October.
Approvals in Microsoft Teams - Approvals will become generally available in October enabling user to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly from Teams.
Approval flows can start from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app.

In the near future, look for integrations with Adobe Sign and DocuSign later this year to get legal consent or approval on electronic documents from people inside or outside the organization. Additionally, approval flows from across the organization can be integrated in Teams with over 350 systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, GITHUB, and more.

Enhanced Power BI app for Teams - Enhancements to the Power BI app for Teams, coming in public preview later this year, will make it easier to discover data from across the organization and quickly create visualizations from Excel datasets right within Teams, collaborate more effectively, and make decisions based on real-time insight. It creates a centralized place for users to find and analyze data, while enhancing usage of Excel and Teams with embedded channel, chat, and meeting experiences.

New Power Automate app for Teams - The new Power Automate app for Teams, coming later this year, offers an enhanced set of templates to automate work in Teams, along with a new designer experience that makes it even easier to get started. Additionally, Microsoft will be rolling out new ways to automate work, including actions like creating a Teams meeting, as well as additional entry points such as message extensions and message actions.