Working from home has been made easy by Microsoft with their updated version of Microsoft Teams for online meetings. With this updated version comes various new accessible features to help enhance the user’s experience. Here are a few that you should consider trying out with your team.
1. Pre-Join Experience for Meetings
Before you join a meeting in Microsoft Teams, you can now change your audio settings, background filters, camera settings, and more. After you make your configurations, you can simply join the meeting!
2. Dynamic View
Now users can personalize their own view to suit the setup they want. This feature allows you to have more control, with the ability to have participants within the meeting and shared content sit side-by-side.
2. Video Filters
Find yourself in a dark room or with a glare affecting your webcam’s view? No more will this be a hassle as Teams supplies you with various video filters available to help adjust lighting levels and soften the focus of the camera.
3. Reflect Messaging Extension
This extension can be provided after an IT administrator installs it from GitHub and makes it available for employees to use in the message extension menu. From here feedback can be given from one to another, allowing teachers or leaders to understand how their students or team members are feeling, or give an update to their status on a specific project. Custom questions can be created and administered to others in a poll-like manner as well.
4. Live Reactions
Sometimes many individuals are talking at once during a meeting, or at times, you can still miss a reaction from someone else when your meeting has a large quantity of attendants. For presenters it’s almost impossible to focus on every individual and gauge their reaction successfully without missing at least one. This feature is shared with PowerPoint Live Presentations as individuals can react during a meeting now with emojis that all participants in the call will be able to see, gaining that instantaneous feedback that some would have otherwise missed.
5. Microsoft Whiteboard Updates
(Image courtesy of Microsoft)
Translating your ideas can sometimes be difficult with just words. This collaboration tool supplies a way for individuals with a touchscreen or Surface Hub to draw out their ideas on a whiteboard-like area. Alongside this comes the ability for those without a touchscreen to add to the application itself with additional features such as: sticky notes, text and drag and drop capabilities.
6. The Tasks App
This app in combination with Teams unifies Microsoft To Do, Planner and Outlook to help you manage all your tasks better in a more precise and efficient manner. A list can be created in a channel to hold all the tasks you need to get done so that you can stay organized!
7. Live Captions and Transcripts
Transcripts will save the dialogue of live captions so that you will be able to go over what was spoken within a meeting without the need to take notes. Afterwards, the transcript file will automatically save into a separate tab to be viewed whenever.
8. Chat Bubbles
Having to navigate from a chat screen back to the video screen can be a hassle to manage without missing something from each. In order to fix this disconnect, Teams will be offering a feature where chat messages will pop up on the screen as they’re sent for you to view and reply to in an efficient, easier manner.
9. Interactive Meetings
At times the quantity of participants within a meeting can be exceeding most application’s limits. With Teams you can talk with up to 1,000 individuals at once where they can each chat and collaborate. Along with this, Teams also allows a view-only meeting experience that can house up to 20,000 participants for when you want to bring participants together for a presentation or discussion.
10. Suggested Replies
Finishing your sentences has never been made more efficient than with suggested replies. This feature uses AI to craft short responses for you to send that relate to the context of the previous messages.
11. Cortana
(Image courtesy of Microsoft)
A part of the Teams mobile app, Cortana, using AI technology and Microsoft Graph in order to help give individuals a hand-free experience when using Teams. Cortana can join meetings, send chat messages, share files and more all at the sound of your voice.
Need Help Setting Up Microsoft Teams?
As one of our many managed IT solutions, Microsoft Teams is a helpful source that can enhance your organization’s online meeting experience. Corcystems Inc. can not only help you set up your Microsoft Teams account today, but we are ready to help introduce you to the platform to make navigation easier. Give our office a call today at (203) 431-1341 to get started.
