Wide range of new features added to Teams
- Date: 20 January, 2021
The Teams collaboration platform has seen a number of important enhancements in recent weeks, including integration with the Project for the web application and new consumer-focused features for the Teams mobile apps.
The growth of Teams has been spectacular, with the accelerated rise of remote working making collaboration tools a boom area. This growth is illustrated by the fact that in November 2019 the number of Teams daily active users stood at 20 million, whilst today it’s over 115 million! And as its popularity increases, so does the demand for new and enhanced services.
No surprise then that Microsoft has recently announced a raft of new features. Here are just some of the highlights:
- Integrating Teams with the Project for the web application, which will allow Teams users to gain access to features from Project for the web, including the automated scheduling to set effort, duration and resources from within Teams. Microsoft confirmed that “Connecting directly to Project from within Teams has been one of the major requests from Project users, and these apps will make it easy to manage, track and collaborate on all aspects of a team’s project in one place”
- Combining calling features like the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts and settings into a single location to streamline the calling experience. In addition, CarPlay support is being added to Teams so that users can take advantage of the built-in controls in their vehicles to operate Teams
- Adding consumer features to Teams desktop and web apps, including starting a personal chat or creating a group chat with up to 250 people and seamlessly syncing existing chats from a phone to a computer and continuing conversations on the device of your choice
- Adding previews of more consumer features to the existing Teams mobile apps for iOS and Android, including the option to chat with contacts on iOS and Android who don’t have Teams installed on their phones by adding them to a group chat
- The general availability of Microsoft Dataverse for Teams (formerly known as Microsoft Dataflex), a data platform that works with the Power Platform suite. Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is designed to make it easier for employees without developer experience to create ad hoc business applications, automated workflows and other such tools from within the Teams collaboration app interface
- In addition to Dataverse for Teams, the following apps for Teams have also been released: Power Apps for Teams, Power Automate for Teams and Power Virtual Agents for Teams
Finally, a number of general user features have been announced. These include a new setting that lets end users control the types of notifications they get in Teams in order to help track activities of interest, and a new feature that provides language-aware proofing for Teams desktop app users writing in multiple languages, meaning that they can get spellchecking support in those particular languages.
