Although Skype continues to exist for some reason, Teams is Microsoft's flagship software for online communication and collaboration. The Redmond tech firm frequently adds new features to Teams during the course of the month, with recent examples being easier account management and an updated minimized meeting view, among other things. Now, the company has published a roundup of all the capabilities it introduced in Teams in the past four weeks, just like it does at the end of each month.

What's new for people using chats and channels?

As we discussed earlier in our Copilot for Microsoft 365 news piece, users of the generative AI technology can leverage the service to scope prompts by time to find different chats, and any insights related to them. Additionally, users will be able to request to join a shared channel with a URL, with channel owners having the ability to approve or deny requests. In the same vein, customers will be able to find more information about a channel through channel cards which contain the channel description, team owner, last activity time, and more. You can find these details by hovering over the channel name in the header.

There are some other improvements in store too. External users can now access apps in group chats, with policies being governed by the organization which hosts the group chats and the applications. Lastly, customers are empowered to hide or show the Discover feed as a part of the latest Teams updates too.

What about those who use meetings, Mesh, webinars, and town halls?

Government Community Cloud (GCC) tenants with a Teams Premium license can leverage intelligent meeting recaps with AI-generated notes. Moreover, intelligent meeting recaps with speaker names and topic titles are also available in unscheduled town hall meetings on Android devices, but this requires a Teams Premium license as well.

Town halls participants have the ability to send reactions, whereas admins and town hall organizers can take advantage of Graph APIs and export Q&A details, respectively. Next, developers can leverage Teams webinar APIs to create and delete events, along with registering attendees to existing webinars. Finally, Mesh customers who host a multi-room event will be able to see the raised hands and reactions of attendees across all rooms. This will enable them to gauge the sentiment of attendees, as long as they have a Teams Premium license.

Teams hardware is getting a bunch of upgrades too

Teams Rooms on Android customers with Teams Pro can now join Zoom meetings with an ID and a passcode. The same category of users also have the ability to set custom backgrounds to showcase their brand identity and provide more information about the Teams Rooms. Lastly, IT admins managing Teams Rooms on Windows can resize the text and UI to adjust visual elements according to various display resolutions.

In addition, the following devices are now Teams-certified:

• Yealink CM20 Ceiling Audio System
• Logitech Rally Bar + Mic Pods for Teams Rooms on Windows (with Lenovo Core)
• Yealink Teams Phone MP E2 series

Of course, this is only a high-level summary of the new features added to Teams during this month. For more information, you can head over to the dedicated blog post here.