What’s new in Teams – Microsoft Ignite Edition

It’s that time of the year that every Microsoft IT pro gets excited for, Microsoft Ignite! Microsoft Ignite was filled with tons of exciting news across all things Microsoft! In this article I’ll be outlining the main highlights of Ignite as described in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531. With that said, let’s jump right in since there is a lot to cover!

New Meeting Tools

At Ignite, Microsoft introduced some cool new meeting tools to enhance your meeting experience. This includes:

• Background Blur: Say goodbye to distractions! Now you can focus your video on what matters most, you! As someone that works from home often, I myself am happy to see this feature since I often have a puppy running around in the background during my calls. Available now!
• Meeting Recording: Meetings can now be recorded in Teams. Now anyone that missed an important meeting can playback recorded audio, video, and content at any time. Also, with the power of Microsoft Stream you can have the ability to pull up transcripts and search keywords. Available now!
• Cloud Video Interop: You can now bring an existing room technology into Microsoft Teams! Through partners like Polycom, BlueJeans and Pexip, your legacy devices can now have full fledged audio/video participants in Microsoft Teams with content sharing. Polycom’s CVI offering is available now, with Pexip and BlueJeans coming in the near future (end of October).

Background blur (screen simulation provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531)

New Capabilities in Teams for Firstline Workers

During Ignite, Microsoft announced some new capabilities catered towards our 2.5 billion firstline workers worldwide. Some of the new capabilities include:

• Home – This is a new mobile experience which allows firstline workers to see what the most relevant and important info for their day includes. Home will allow firstline workers to clock in/out of shift breaks, receive important notes regarding their day and/or shift, find out whom is working during which shift and save time by easily reviewing information and schedule.
• Shifts – This new capability will allow firstline managers to plan schedules in an employee self-service integrated experience. Shifts allows managers to create, update, and distribute schedules for teams as well as broadcast open/unfilled shifts for employees to cover them. Managers can review and accept time off requests and swap shifts while firstline workers can swap/offer shifts and request time off all from their mobile phones.

Image provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

Note: Home and Shifts will be available soon in Teams. In addition, Microsoft StaffHub will be retired October 1, 2019.

• Image Annotation – Capture images, annotate, and share them on a secure platform. IT Admins can set policies to prevent images from being stored on a mobile device or local drive.
• Priority Notifications – Alert the recipient to an urgent message and automatically notify the recipient every 2 minutes for up to 20 minutes.

Images provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

• Private Preview of Care Coordination – Coordinate patient care, host meetings, and connect the Microsoft 365 platform with Electronics Health Records.

Image provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

Microsoft Teams Certified Devices

At Ignite Microsoft announced new devices across both personal and shared spaces from partners like:  AudioCodes, Crestron, HP, Jabra, Lenovo, Logitech, Polycom, Plantronics, and Yealink. Some of the personal and shared devices announced include:

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Image provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

Image provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

Surface Hub 2: Coming 2019

The Teams app for Microsoft Hub is already available within the Microsoft store. This provides full Teams calling and meeting capabilities, including one-touch join and up to 4 incoming video streams. Coming in 2019, you will have the opportunity to get one of these light, sleek, and intelligently designed devices called the Surface Hub 2. You can expect to see these hit the market in the second quarter of 2019. See the full announcement here.

Image provided by: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531

Get Certified with the Microsoft Teams Program

Speaking of certified devices, Microsoft Teams has introduced a new certification program – Certified for Microsoft Teams. This program will allow customers to quickly learn about devices that are certified and supported for Microsoft Teams. To find out more about the certified devices and find the recommended devices for your work space, please visit http://office.com/teamsdevices.

Do More Within Teams

You can now do the following all within the Teams client:

• Enrich your private chat experience with screen sharing: You can now share your entire desktop or a specific window directly from a private chat session. You can even let them take control to collaborate on content together.
• Chat made accessible: Personalize text and page themes for increased visibility, minimize visual distractions with Line Focus, or follow along with the personalized text reader.
• Calling for everyone: Beginning in October, Microsoft will enable the Calls App for everyone who is VOIP-enabled.
• Boost your productivity with a tighter integration between Teams and SharePoint: Enjoy the full capabilities of SharePoint libraries in your file tab with features like creating a custom view and pin-ing a document to the top. Additionally, you will have the ability to add SharePoint lists and SharePoint Framework web parts as tabs in your team’s channel Link to SharePoint blog post
• Access your Yammer community via a tab in Teams: You can include relevant Yammer groups directly in Teams for easy monitoring and engagement by adding them as a tab in any of your team channels.

Note: You will soon be able to add an online Teams Meeting option to your calendar events and join a Teams Meeting right from Outlook mobile (early 2019)

Improved Teams Developer Tools

With this newest update to Teams, organizations will have the ability to extend their experience with developer tools, third-party integrations, and more. This includes:

• Teams Developer Platform Enhancements
  • Microsoft has announced the general availability of Adaptive Cards, which provide rich, interactive, and flexible card system that works across Teams, Outlook, Windows, and Cortana.
    • Microsoft has announced the preview of Task Module Integration, enabling a rich popup experience using either an adaptive card or embedded web content.
    • Teams App Studio enhancements. Check out all the details here.
• Deeper Integration with Microsoft Graphs
  • Microsoft has recently introduced several new APIs for automating team life-cycles
    • Tab Creation APIs
    • Calls and online meetings APIs
• Integration SharePoint and Teams
  • Microsoft has introduced the preview of a single Office 365 Platform for deploying your hosted application experience into both SharePoint and Teams. This will provide a consistent developer and user experience, regardless of whether your code is hosted in the cloud or within an organization via SharePoint.
• Continued investments for Teams Platform
  • Recently Microsoft has announced new integrations with ServiceNow, Bentley, ADP, Autodesk, Adobe, and more. For developers, we’ve also received great feedback from Atlassian’s announcement, sharing that Jira and Bitbucket now integrate with Teams.

Secure Your Data with new Admin Tools

With the newest updates to the admin tools within Microsoft Teams you’ll be able to:

• Work confidently knowing that your sensitive data is protected
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Teams will enable you to identify, monitor, and automatically protect sensitive information.
    • With DLP, you can soon create policies directly from the Security and Compliance Center to prevent sensitive information – credit card numbers, social security numbers, or health records – from being shared or leaking unintentionally.
• Manage your team membership with dynamic groups
  • Reduce the administrative overhead of adding and removing users by creating teams from Office 365 groups with a dynamic membership rule
    • Membership is managed dynamically based on user’s Azure Active Directory (AAD) attributes.
    • Learn more about dynamic groups here.
• Replicate your best Team’s experience with Templates
  • You soon will be able to easily create new teams based on best practices and lessons learned by leveraging a new REST endpoint as part of the Microsoft Graph API.
    • With Team Templates, you’ll be able to pre-define a team’s channels, apps, and tabs that can help you easily create consistent teams across your organization.
    • You can also define team settings and auto-favorite channels, allowing your team owners to focus on collaborations rather than spending time setting up the team.
• Manage your teams directly from the Admin Center
  • A list of all teams in your organization is now available directly in the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center.
    • Manage membership, add or remove channels, and change settings.
    • Create a new team, customize it, and add members allowing you to better support your users.
• New Teams Administrator Role
  • Users can be assigned the Teams admin roles via the Azure Admin Portal
    • Find details about the available admin roles here.
• Supporting Skype for Business Server Customers
  • Skype for Business server 2019 will be generally available by end of year and we will continue to support on-premises customers with functionality they need while also making it easier than ever to use cloud features.

That concludes all of the news from Microsoft Ignite! As mentioned at the beginning of this article, these topics came from https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Teams-Microsoft-Ignite-Edition/ba-p/252531 so I suggest checking out Microsoft’s official post for a more in depth explanation on some of these topics. Stay tuned as well, I intend to dig into some of these topics in upcoming blogs.