What’s new in Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Ignite 2022 Announcements

At Microsoft Ignite 2022, the company took the opportunity to unveil their latest innovations coming to Microsoft Teams to “make teamwork easier, more flexible, and inclusive.”

Meetings

Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams
Mesh avatars offer flexibility and choice in how you show up in Teams meetings with customized, animated versions of yourself. You can design up to three unique avatars using hundreds of options—from physical attributes to accessories and more. Use your audio-driven Mesh avatar in Teams meetings and choose from a wide range of reactions to express yourself without turning on your camera.

Excel Live
Excel Live is a new feature that allows attendees to interact and edit an Excel file right from the meeting itself. You don’t even need to have Excel running on your device. The shared meeting window becomes an interactive canvas without anyone having to leave the meeting screen or open the file separately. Excel Live is starting to roll out this month. Learn more.

Collaborative annotation in Teams meetings
Collaborative annotations leverage the toolset and canvas of Whiteboard, allowing you to draw, type, and react directly to content being shared in a Teams meeting. Collaborative annotations are now generally available.

Cameo in PPT Live
Cameo is a new PowerPoint experience that seamlessly integrates your Teams camera feed into your presentation. PowerPoint Cameo lets you customize how and where you want to appear on your slides, as well as offering design recommendations for optimal viewing. Cameo in PowerPoint Live is now generally available in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Polls Updates
With Polls for Teams meetings, you can engage with your meeting participants in a variety of ways, make decisions quickly within the meeting, and encourage interactivity to keep the momentum going. Use a check-in or “ice breaker” poll to get everyone warmed up or ask participants to vote on or rank their favorite proposals in a choice poll. Polls for Teams is now generally available.

Chat and Collaboration

Updated channel experience
Microsoft has re-imagined Teams channels to make it easier to focus and collaborate. The new layout has recent posts at the top, so users can easily catch up on the latest conversations, contribute to discussions, and pop-out posts to return to them more quickly. Choose from a range of new post types, pin important posts for quick reference, and find key information about the channel in the info pane—including channel members, shared files, and more. Channel headers also can be customized with the organization’s brand or add an image that reflects the teams’ personality and vibe. Learn more.

Expanded reactions
Expanded reactions express feedback more creatively with over 800 Teams emojis for every situation. Communicate reactions to celebrate, express your agreement, or use a reaction to draw attention to a task list. In addition, you will now be able to apply reactions to an email message in Outlook. Expanded reactions in Teams and Outlook will be generally available in November.

Suggested replies in group chat
Instead of spending time typing a routine response to an incoming message, simply reply with one click by choosing a suggested response to your group chat. Suggested replies use machine learning to generate responses that are most relevant to the conversation. This is generally available in October.

Recommended people when creating a new message
Save time looking for the right stakeholders. Using AI, Teams chat will assist you in initiating new conversations by recommending colleagues based on your previous collaborations. This will be generally available by the end of the year.

Add people to a group chat with @mention
Add new participants to the chat with @mention, removing the need to manually navigate to the add-dialog. When adding a new participant, you can control how much of the chat history to share. This will be generally available by end of the year.

Mention @everyone
Grab the attention of everyone in a chat quickly with @everyone. Everyone in the chat will receive a notification, removing the hassle of mentioning each person’s name one by one or missing someone. This ensures senders that a notification has been sent to the full chat audience and it helps recipients prioritize messages more efficiently. Private preview by the end of the year.

Delete chat
Organize and easily remove chat conversations you no longer need without impacting other participants in the same chat conversation. This will be generally available by the end of the year.

Schedule send
Similar to delaying the delivery of emails in Outlook, you now can manually select the future date and time you would like a chat message to be delivered. Simply right-click the send button to schedule send. Additionally, if this is outside the work hours of the recipient, you will automatically get schedule send suggestions from Viva Insights. With just one click, users can send a chat message in confidence knowing the message can be delivered at the start of the recipient’s work hours. Schedule send will be generally available in November, and schedule send suggestions will be generally available by the end of the year.

Video clip
Short but rich video clips allow you to express yourself, deliver a more personal touch, and strengthen your connections. Simply record, send, and view a video clip in chat. The recipient of the video clip can easily reply with a chat message or a video clip of their own. This is now generally available in desktop and will be in public preview in mobile by end of the year.

Work hours and location
Give your co-workers visibility by setting up your work location for the day. Now they’ll know which days you’ll be in the office or working from home, making it easier to coordinate in-person meetings. Whenever something comes up, update your plans in Teams or Outlook. Any changes will be reflected in both platforms. without affecting the rest of your week. This will be in private preview by the end of the year.