What's New in Microsoft Teams

What’s New In Microsoft Teams

Teams is Gaining 7x7 View
Being able to see all of your colleagues’ faces at the same time makes a big difference in engagement and connection. Coming to preview this month with general availability coming soon, large gallery view expands the Teams grid view to 7×7, which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen.

Virtual Breakout Rooms
Breakout Rooms allow meeting organizers to split their Teams meeting participants into small groups to assist ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions. Teams facilitates this by assigning participants into a requested number of rooms—whether automatically directing people or prompting them to join. Organizers can jump in between meetings on their own—or when requested by a participant—, provide announcements to the individual rooms, and recall everyone back to the meeting at any time. Any collaboration and coauthoring done during the breakout can be shared back to the larger meeting once everyone is back together. Breakout Rooms will be delivered later this calendar year.

Meeting Attendee limit increases to 300 Participants
In response to customer requests, Microsoft is increasing the maximum number of participants allowed in Teams meeting to 300.

New Teams Experience for Launching Channel Meetings
Meet Now buttons in Teams channels will have a new home. You will soon find them in the Channel header where you can easily find and launch a channel meeting.

New capabilities on Microsoft Teams Mobile
People app - to easily organize your contacts by creating and managing contact groups.

Live captions - to see real time captions in meetings (Live Captions is currently a preview feature in Microsoft Teams and available in English (US) for now).
Teams and Skype interoperability – releasing this month, users will be able to make and receive audio and video calls from Skype for Consumer (SFC) through Microsoft Teams phones.

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

Teams Mobile On-Demand Chat Translation
Inline message translation ensures that everyone has a voice and facilitate global collaboration. With a simple click, people who speak different languages can fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat. On-Demand Chat Translation has already been available on desktop and web, and now will be available on iOS.

Priority notifications
Originally announced in June 2019, priority notifications for Microsoft Teams grants you the ability to continually send notifications that repeat every two minutes for up to 20 minutes on all messages marked as urgent. Priority notifications had been made available as a promotion to all Teams customers* until the second half of 2020.