Microsoft has announced many new features for Microsoft Teams, promising that the advancements will further streamline how people work and collaborate, thus elevating the overall user experience. The software giant has also teased a bunch of new capabilities that will be available in the coming months.

What are the latest new features in Microsoft Teams?

Last month, Microsoft added a plethora of new features to Teams, all of which are currently available to everyone. Now, in addition to all those, Microsoft has announced the general availability of improvements that will help you create and join teams and channels easily, more effective collaboration, and the ability to archive a channel.

Easier way to create and join teams and channels

One of the ways Microsoft made it easier to create and join teams and channels is by reducing the number of steps needed to create them. We'll now be able to create a team quicker than before, as create a team from scratch is now the default experience. While creating it, you'll also see the More create team options, which will take you to the template library, thus allowing you to choose what's best for your organization. Another noteworthy change is the new Create channel option in the same menu you use to create a new team.

Moreover, Microsoft has introduced the option for users to find and join public and private teams, thus preventing admins from creating duplicate teams. On top of it, admins can also control whether users will be able to find a private team.

New AI feature for effective collaboration

Microsoft has used AI to make collaboration more effective in Teams. Microsoft Teams now offers an AI-powered feature called "Discover feed", which shows you content from channels that are not on your channel list, ensuring you don't miss any posts from people you work with. This has long been available on rival platform Slack. What's more, you can hide the general channel and mark all your notifications as read with a single click in the activity feed.

There is one more way collaboration has become more effective in Teams. It's now possible to share the link to the channel, a post, or a reply with your colleague. This way, your colleagues can navigate specific content and conversations, without going through the pain of searching through messages and files.

Lastly, Microsoft is rolling out the option to retire a channel when the collaboration in a project ends. That's what the new archive a channel option will do. You archive a channel to preserve its content and turn off actions like messaging, reacting, and commenting.

New features coming to Teams in the coming months

Joining the channel will become a lot easier by the end of this year when Microsoft will roll out the capability that will show you channels that are relevant to you, including the ones recommended by the team owners. Also coming later this year is the ability to rename the general channel. Microsoft also has plans to declutter your channel list. In the third quarter of this year, Microsoft Teams will be able to automatically detect and hide inactive channels you haven't interacted with over the past 45 days.

During the second and third quarters, Microsoft will also roll out the ability to mute all notifications from a specific channel post as well as customize the sound of the notifications.

That's all the new features Microsoft announced for Teams users: some are already available and others are coming later this year. Microsoft will introduce more advancements to Teams this month as well as continue to keep us updated about what new features it'll introduce in the future.