Microsoft Teams has increased its features and functionality by leaps and bounds over the past couple years and this is only the start! Microsoft has invested a lot of time and effort into this tool to make it the true “hub for teamwork” that they intend for it to be. With all that being said, there are still quite a few asks from the Microsoft community regarding features and functionality that have not quite made their way into Teams yet. In this article we’ll be going over the top 5 asks from the Microsoft community and show you the current progress of these requests!
Status: “Working on it”
This is the most requested feature by the Microsoft community. This request has generated over 24,500+ votes so far, so you can tell this feature is in high demand. Luckily Microsoft is already testing this functionality in preview for a select group of customers and intends to release this for general availability sometime late October/early November time frame!
Request 2: Ability to use multiple Teams accounts at the same time
Status: “Working on it”
Although this request has about half the votes from the previous request, it still has a whopping 12,200+ votes! This is the second most requested feature and it entails having multiple Teams accounts in Office 365 signed in simultaneously in one interface. For example, if you are a consultant and you deal with several organizations at once (thus you have multiple Office 365 accounts), it would be nice to have the ability to easily switch from one customer to the next without having to log out of one customer’s tenant and into another’s. Having to do this constantly becomes very tedious and time consuming. Microsoft is currently implementing this feature in stages and has indicated that fast tenant switching is currently in testing both internally and with early customers. The expected release for the feature to the public was said to be fall, but we haven’t seen any updates since early July so hopefully we get some updates soon! Microsoft also mentioned that full multi-tenant/multi-user support will be added after fast tenant switching has been enabled publicly.
Request 3: Integration of Office 365 Groups calendar in Teams
Status: “Working on it”
Another highly demanded request from the Microsoft community (11,600+ votes) but this revolves around Office 365 groups. As you may know, upon the creation of a team an Office 365 group is created on the backend. This request pertains to the ability to view the group calendar within Microsoft Teams instead of having to view the group availability within the Outlook calendar. As of July 2019, Microsoft has indicated that this feature is being tested by the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) team and they are in the process of determining a good time to roll this out to the public. This would definitely be a nice addition and although this feature is not necessarily “required” it just makes things easier to access rather than having to jump back and forth between Outlook and Teams when you want to see what the group has coming up on their calendar. It all goes back to the “hub for teamwork” claim and this additional feature would just solidify that point.
Request 4: Compact mode in Teams
Status: “Planned”
You may not think this is something required but it is certainly something in high demand with a whopping 11,100+ votes! The Microsoft community is in agreement that the Teams UI consumes a lot of your desktop real estate and the community wants the ability to keep a tighter window all while seeing the chat and text visible. Often times you’ll find yourself scrolling endlessly to get through some of the Teams UI so having a more condensed mode that you can enable on the user side would be greatly appreciated for those looking to preserve more space on their desktop. Microsoft has switched the status of this feature between “Working on it” and “Planned” over the past year. Currently, this is set to “planned” status so it doesn’t look like this is of the utmost importance to Microsoft at this time but is on their radar.
Request 5: Multi-window for chats and more
Status: “Working on it”
With over 10,600+ votes the request to have pop-out chats within Teams is in quite high demand. Many users are coming from Skype for Business where they had the ability to pop-out chats so they could more easily multi-task. Having this ability in Teams would allow users to pop-out chats so they could handle conversations while still navigating through the Teams UI. Currently, looking for files or being in a meeting while having several chats ongoing can become a very daunting task because both can not be done simultaneously. Luckily Microsoft sees the demand for this capability and are exploring different solutions to enable this. As with the other requests outlined above, we haven’t received any word since the beginning of Q3 so hopefully we receive another update soon!
This concludes the list of the top 5 in demand features and functionality that haven’t quite made their way into Teams yet. Since Ignite is only a few weeks away we may get an update on some of these features around that time (or at least we can hope). Some other honorable mentions that didn’t make it on the top 5 list include:
- Moving channels into other teams
- Status: “On the backlog”
- My feedback: The release of private channels should fix many of these concerns around having to create a brand new team and new channel when it is determined that a large work stream needs to be separated into its own work stream. Fingers crossed this happens soon!
- Status: “On the backlog”
- Linux client for Teams
- Status: “Working on it”
- My feedback: Microsoft has already confirmed this is in the works and should be released to the public in the next couple months. They are actively testing this and had provided an update a little over a month ago (Sept. 6th, 2019) so maybe they’ll release this at Ignite!? One can hope 🙂
- Status: “Working on it”
- Archive a channel in Teams
- Status: “On the backlog”
- My feedback: Although this is stated as “on the backlog” it is kind of partially complete. Since archiving a team exists today, this covers the archival of the channel within the team. When the team is archived all activity for that team ceases, but you can still add/remove members, update roles, and view all team activity in channels, files, and chats. However, it would be helpful to have the ability to only archive the channel without having to archive the entire team.
- Status: “On the backlog”
- Ability to see who is in a channel
- Status: “Working on it”
- My feedback: Today you can see the members of the team but once private channels are released not everyone will have access to all channels anymore meaning this will become a necessity. So as of right now this is not very important but in the near future this will be required.
- Status: “Working on it”
This list goes on and on but I feel that we have covered a majority of the highly demanded requests. To see this never ending list (or even add your own request) you can do that here. I hope you have found this helpful and here is to hoping we see some of these capabilities released before the end of 2019!
