Microsoft regularly adds tons of features to its online communication and collaboration platform, Teams. While the service is also available for personal users, it is primarily intended for enterprise customers. Typically, the Redmond tech firm publishes a roundup of all the capabilities it introduced to Teams in the previous four weeks, further divided into lots of categories. However, this time around, its roundup consists of just four sections, which we will cover below.

What's new in chat and collaboration?

For starters, Teams users can now upload and create custom emoji to add more personality to conversations, as we discussed earlier this month. Additionally, the built-in search functionality in Teams has been enhanced, so as you begin typing in the search bar, recent chat message suggestions will surface with additional context too, enabling you to quickly jump to a particular message. Moreover, users can also navigate to Settings > Notifications and activity in order to exercise more granular control when it comes to notification sounds and alerts. Channel post notifications can be turned on and off for specific posts as well by clicking on the ellipsis icon on a post and tapping on Turn on/off notifications. Lastly, enterprise customers will be pleased to know that cross-cloud guest access on the web is now available.

What about meetings, Mesh, webinars, and town halls?

Teams customers can now leverage a new meeting gallery view which assigns equally sized tiles to all participants, regardless of whether they have their videos on or not. The default view will feature 16 people, but it can be increased to 49. There are some other ways that meeting participants can customize their meeting views too, such as adjusting tile sizes.

There are a few new features for Teams Events users as well. These include orderability of presenters on event pages in webinars, management of the content attendees see when they attend a town hall or a webinar, and the availability of town hall events in the Government Community Cloud (GCC).

Meanwhile, Teams Premium customers can utilize ready-to-use Event templates in Microsoft Mesh, along with the ability to revisit event links. Mesh users can additionally take advantage of new avatar reactions and also set personal boundaries within the immersive 3D environment so that other people don't get uncomfortably close.

That's great, but what about Teams hardware?

When it comes to Teams Rooms and devices, all Teams Rooms on Windows customers can utilize detailed AI-powered meeting recaps and also ask questions from Copilot to gain more insights into the data being presented to them. This feature will be powered by Microsoft's cloud-based speaker recognition service which will analyze various characteristics of voices, such as pitch, tone, and speaking style.

For those more interested on the hardware side, the following devices are now Teams-certified:

• Sennheiser TeamConnect Bar M
• Jabra PanaCast 50
• Yealink WH64 Headset

Lastly, Teams Phone users can now use explicit recording consent notifications, set up private lines, leverage the updated People app, and more. That said, this is just an overview of the new features present in Teams, and you can find out more details in Microsoft's blog post here.