Microsoft Teams is 3 years old and Microsoft are still committed to rolling out great new features. Here's what's coming out soon!

High quality audio even on poor connections

When joining meetings over a poor WiFi or cellular connection—whether taking a call on the go or joining a meeting from a crowded conference hotel—high data packet loss can adversely affect the audio experience. With our new algorithmic improvements in Teams, you now experience greater audio quality even under congested and lossy networks. Through a combination of smart jitter buffer logic, burst loss detection, and triggering of redundant transmissions, we can ensure smooth audio playback, even under high burst loss. Many customers are already noticing an improved audio experience, especially given the overloaded networks we are seeing today. These improvements have rolled out to Teams customers worldwide.

Background Blur for iOS

Background blur is one of the most useful tools for meetings, it keeps the focus on you and not your surroundings. Particularly useful when you find yourself working from home in a makeshift office.

Microsoft is shortly rolling this out for all iOS devices, which means you'll be able to make use of this great feature on your iPhones and iPads

Bookings App in Teams

The Bookings app offers a simple way to schedule, conduct appointments and even hold interviews with external participants via Microsoft Teams. This is perfect for client meetings, virtual GP appointments, financial consultations and even customer service appointments. The Bookings App allows you to manage multiple departments and staff in a single scheduling experience and allows you to easily schedule virtual appointments with external attendees. The Bookings App even takes care of joining details for your external recipients, sending a customised email with details of the appointment and how to join.

Raise Hands in Meetings

"Raise Hands" makes it easy to identify meeting attendees who have something to say. This is particularly useful in large video meetings where it can be harder to pick your moment to speak. The Raise Hands feature puts a visual cue on everyone's video feed as well as the participant list, giving everyone a chance to be heard.

Reduce Background Noise

Whether it be ambient noise from a café, noisy typing in a conference room, or construction noise outside your home office, unwanted background noise can be quite distracting in your Teams meetings. We are excited to announce real-time noise suppression, a new feature in Teams that will automatically remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings.

We will soon bring real-time noise suppression to Teams meetings and calls, and we are excited to announce that beginning soon, noise suppression will be generally available for recorded video content in Stream. Now it’s easy to eliminate distracting background noise in training videos or communications, so you can focus on the person speaking, not what’s happening around them.

Noise suppression works by analyzing an individual’s audio feed and uses specially trained deep neural networks to filter out noise and retain only the speech signal. While traditional noise suppression algorithms can only address simple stationary noise sources such as fan noise, our AI-based approach learns the difference between speech and noise, and is able to suppress all forms of noise including non-stationary sources that we commonly encounter in our meetings such as typing, eating chips, and road noise, just to name a few.

Targeted Communications for Shift Workers

Currently, with Targeted Communications in Teams, you can create tags to organize users manually based on attributes such as role or location. You can message everyone assigned to a tag in new chat or bring attention to a channel post by @mentioning the tag name. And coming soon, Teams takes the guesswork out of knowing who is on-shift when needing to communicate as messages can be targeted to recipients based on their role and the shifts they are working. Users are automatically assigned to tags matching their schedule in the Shifts app in Teams, which allows for integration with major workforce management systems, including AMiON, JDA, and Kronos.

Schedule Filtering

You can now filter schedules by teams and users, allowing you to easily manage large shift schedules, swap team members shifts and have a complete overview of your team at a glance.

Recall Shared Schedules

This handy feature allows you to recall both single and multiple schedules at the touch of a button, making it easy to make any necessary changes.

Your Shifts View

Allow team members to quickly access their shift information without having to scroll through the rest of their team. This will become the default landing page for Shifts desktop and web.

Pop-Out Teams Chat Windows

Participating in several conversations simultaneously can become a real juggling act, pop put individual Teams chats will help you manage and streamline your workflow more easily by allowing you to seamlessly move between several conversations.

Access Teams even without an Internet connection

Now you can open and access Teams even when you are on an airplane without Internet access, or on a remote work site with terrible network conditions. Teams is enhancing the user experience for offline (no Internet connection) experiences and for low-bandwidth network environments. We are happy to announce that the first phase of multi-phase rollout is complete. Teams users will now be able to open Teams even when no network is available. You will be able to create and read messages, browse previously viewed channels, and to view calendar summaries. Pinned chats, pinned channels, and recently visited chats and channels will always be available offline.

Teams is also now optimized to work in a low- or poor-performing network scenarios. For example, users will now be able to send messages even with sub-optimal connectivity. If conditions are too poor to send a message, Teams will notify users of this and then save the message until the user has returned to a functioning network. This functionality is coming to Teams in the next few weeks.

Include up to 10,000 users in an individual team

We have raised the upper limit on individual team membership from 5,000 to 10,000 users. We are excited for this increase in team membership to power collaboration and process scenarios especially for large teams and organizations that rely on firstline workers. This limit will start rolling out to customers next month. 

Group chat with up to 250 people

Sometimes you need to kick off a big project chat with a large group, or organize an ad-hoc discussion with staff at an event, but it is unnecessary to start a new team; perhaps you don’t all work together on a regular basis, or maybe you need a communication channel with a large group of people at an event. Group chats will be able to accommodate up to 250 users! This limit will start rolling out to customers soon.

Teams & Skype Consumer chat and calling interoperability

Teams users will soon be able to find and communicate with users on the Skype consumer service, allowing businesses using Teams to engage with customers and colleagues on the iconic communications platform, across all clients including iOS and Android.

This new interoperability will allow Teams and Skype consumer users to chat and make calls using Voice over IP (VoIP) initiated by either client using an email address (phone number or Skype ID searches are not supported at this time.) For safety and security, Teams users can accept or decline first-time conversations with Skype users, and may block and unblock contacts.