Microsoft Teams Update Promises More Natural Meeting

Microsoft Teams announced a huge update on June 8 that they believe will change how we collaborate virtually. Yesterday, we wrote a piece about the Mmhmm app, which seeks to improve the video call experience as a whole, so this area is clearly a focus for a lot of people. In that post, I talked about how companies want to make the video/virtual meeting feel as natural and “normal” as possible. In my mind, that’s the focus of this Teams update. Teams wants to make your video collaboration more personal and as the blog post announcing all these updates puts it, “more human.” If you want to check out this quick rundown video, here you go:
https://youtu.be/A1egcVkYrgw
In this post, I’m going to list all the updates they covered in their post with a few comments for each, but then stay tuned to the site because I’ll go into more detail on a few of them. In the blog post, Jared Spataro, Vice President for Microsoft 365, states that this update seeks to connect you better to your team, make your meetings more inclusive, and ultimately save you time.

Connect

• Together Mode: Remember in my Mmhmm post when I spoke about the importance of body language and facial expressions? Apparently, Microsoft agrees with me. In Together mode, AI systems will place meeting participants in a virtual shared space to allow you to focus on body language and “non-verbal cues.”
• Dynamic View: The enhancements here are once again AI-driven. This update wants to make it easier for you to consume a lot of different shared information and video sources. You’ll be able to view 49 different camera feeds as well as break that huge meeting down into smaller sessions (controllable by the meeting coordinator).
• Video Filters: I believe it was Instagram we can thank for popularizing the photo filter. Now, Teams will allow you to apply a similar type of lighting/shade filter on your video feed before entering the meeting. They didn’t say a whole lot about this feature compared to the others, and neither will I.
• Reflect Messaging Extension: This update is all about checking in with employees. It’s an extension that when installed will give administrators the ability to quickly poll employees about their feelings toward a certain topic or direction, or perhaps get a sense of overall morale. The results can be anonymous or not.

Inclusiveness

• Live Reactions: I can’t remember which live platform introduced the idea of emoji reactions floating on the screen while in use. Now, you’ll be able to do that in Microsoft Teams. With the more faces in a meeting you have, the more difficult it can be to keep up with everyone’s reactions. This feature seeks to help with that by allowing participants to react with emojis. I talked about why emojis and avatars are so important to our communication just last week, and here they are showing up again. I need to see it in actual motion to make sure it won’t be distracting for a presenter.
• Chat Bubbles: Currently, when you want to open the chat in a Teams meeting, you have to click to open it. With this update, chat bubbles will simply appear on the screen for everyone. Again, I’m curious how distracting that could be, especially considering how big meetings are allowed to be in Teams. That might be a lot of chat bubbles popping up all the time. We’ll see.
• Speaker Attribution: For live captions (which already exist on the platform), Teams will now say who is speaking in addition to transcribing the words being spoken. For someone reading along during the meeting, this is a huge addition since you don’t have to track down which video feed the speaking is coming from.
• 1000 Interactive Participants: I don’t know just how interactive a meeting can be with 1000 participants, but Teams is allowing it. You won’t be able to have that many video feeds on screen at once, but you’ll still be able to have audio capabilities. If that’s not enough for you, Teams will also offer a view-only experience for 20,000 participants.
• Whiteboard: Teams is updating the Whiteboard to be faster and have more features like drag and drop.

Saving Time

• Tasks: For anyone who uses the Tasks app, integration into Teams is a welcome site. Being able to see what’s assigned to you in a project, all without having to leave the Teams environment, is a great thing.
• Suggested Replies: AI-driven responses to messages is becoming more and more widespread. It’s a feature that’s been in Outlook for a while, and now you’ll be able to harness the single-click response in Teams as well.
• Cortana: There she is. A little while ago, Microsoft made the decision to reposition Cortana to be more business focused. Her functionality in that role up to this point has been… I don’t know that I’ve ever used them. But when she comes to teams, she’ll be able to help you do a variety of functions such as setting up a meeting, joining a meeting, sending messages, opening files, and more. They want her to create a hands-off experience for you, which if I’m being honest, is something that appeals to me. So if it works, I’m all in. But it needs to work…
• Teams Displays: If you didn’t already have enough dedicated displays in your home or office, you can take advantage of Teams-only displays soon. This device will take advantage of everything we’ve covered in this post so far, providing you with a dedicate Microsoft Teams experience. So if that appeals to you, there you go.

Whew, that’s a big update. As I’ve said before, though, given the world we’re living in right now, updates to messaging and meeting apps are going to be fast and furious. These companies want to bring us better experiences for meeting with people at a distance, but they also want to give us reasons to stay within their ecosystem. One thing Microsoft has done really well with Teams is build a true ecosystem that allow organizations to pretty much function from within this one interface. As time moves on, I know we’ll see more and more MS apps integration with the platform. For now, we’ll just be waiting for this round of updates to hit the service sometime this year.