Microsoft is today celebrating the second anniversary of its Microsoft Teams collaboration solution for Office 365. To celebrate the event, the company has detailed the success of Teams over those two years. Furthermore, Microsoft is releasing some important new features for the service across platforms.
In its announcement today, Microsoft said Teams has been adopted by over 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100. Over two years, Microsoft Teams has been made available in 44 languages in 181 regions.
Microsoft says Teams will soon receive nine new languages: Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.
“Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion,” Microsoft 365 general manager Lori Wright says. “We’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure.”
Teams on Mobile
Microsoft has announced eight new features now available for the recently announced Microsoft Teams mobile experience:
- Customized, green screen-like backgrounds for video chat
- Support for Microsoft’s Intelligent Capture technologies so that USB cameras can be used to capture content like whiteboard images and text
- Support for Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams so that in-person attendees can also contribute
- Live captions for those who are deaf or hard of hearing
- Secure private channels so that content can be limited to the right audience without having to create separate teams
- Information barriers to avoid conflicts of interest within an organization and limit which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations so that sensitive information is automatically detected and protected
Another Push Against Slack
Microsoft Teams has been competing well against Slack and today new features are coming to Teams that are not available on Slack. Users are now able to customize backgrounds on Teams. With the feature, users can join a video call and change the background seen on the other end. Microsoft says customizable backgrounds are coming to Teams later this year.
Teams iOS Update
The Microsoft Teams app for Apple’s iOS has been bumped to Version 1.0.70. With this release, Microsoft has added new media settings for meetings, and the ability to include a note with an RSVP.
