Each month, Microsoft Teams gains a bunch of new features across its various offerings. Teams has increasingly become a major product for Microsoft in the enterprise realm. Growing – but facing stiff competition – Teams must be well taken care of with new features to remain a potent option.
April was a particularly busy month for Microsoft Teams, with new abilities lading across devices, education, free Teams, and the standard Teams platforms. So, without out further to do, let’s jump right in and see what is new in Microsoft Teams over the last month.
Meetings
The popular Meetings feature on Teams got some important changes, including the ability to share system audio within a meeting on the web. Microsoft also added new tools for presenters to use, and introduced automatic music detection to combat background noise:
- “Anonymous meeting join across clouds
- Usability improvements to notifications in meetings for iOS
- Share the system audio from meetings on web
- Presenter mode: Controls to move and resize presenter video
- Improved meeting support in Firefox browser
- Detect Music Automatically
- Support of Live Caption for Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix”
Calling
Calling on Teams will be an even better experience with the introduction of Outlook contact integration. Microsoft also brought an Emergency Calling banner to the product:
- “Outlook contacts available to select for calling
- Custom banner for Emergency Calling
- Administrator configuration of end-user call forwarding settings”
Devices
There was not much happening on the device’s front during April, although Microsoft did add a new options. Specifically, users can now restore the “Present” button in Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows devices.
Certified devices
Microsoft debuted an expansion of certified devices with a bunch of new products dropping last month. Among them were new meeting room products, tabletop hardware, and conference room speakers from OEMs:
- “Logitech RoomMate
- Logitech Tap Scheduler Panel
- Yealink Teams HD IP Conference Phone
- Huddly L1 and Crestron Flex
- Sennheiser TeamConnect Intelligent Speaker
- Yamaha ADECIA Ceiling Solution
- Extron DMP64 & DMP 128 PLUS C V AT DSP System
- EPOS ADAPT 361, 461T, and 661 headsets”
Chat and collaboration
Mobile users are finally getting text prediction when writing in chat. This is a feature that has been a long time coming to Teams on iOS and Android. Elsewhere, Microsoft brought its Fluent emojis to Teams chat. Here’s the full changelog:
- “Text prediction for Teams mobile
- Power Automate templates to be added to teams templates
- New Fluent Emoji style coming to Teams emojis and reactions
- Suggested replies in chats
- Upload files to your approval request via Power Automate portal
- Chat filter for non-meeting chats”
Management
Admins have a bunch of new tools to make managing Teams across an organization easier:
- “Admins can pin message extensions
- Teams device store in Teams admin center
- Follow Office preview policy on Mac
- User request flows for blocked apps”
Teams for Education
There were just a couple of changes to Teams for Education in April, include a Class Notebook notification:
- “Students and educators get a notification when a new Class Notebook page is distributed
- Data reports after Teams meeting class”
Frontline workers
Frontline workers using Microsoft Teams now have more integration with Microsoft Bookings and Microsoft Forms:
- “Virtual appointments through Microsoft Bookings in Teams – Microsoft Forms integration
- Walkie Talkie app in Teams is available on Kyocera 5G Rugged Smartphones
- New Tag Management Settings”
Government
Government users are always playing catch-up to commercial versions of Teams dues to the standards that need to be met. Below is the April changelog for Teams Government that highlights features that other versions already have but are new to government users;
- “Attendance Dashboard
- Teams webinar capabilities
- Auto-answer meeting invites with video on for iOS devices
- Invite-only meeting options
- Share the system audio from meetings on web
- Large Gallery and Together Mode in Teams Meetings on Web and VDI
- Voice enabled channels for GCC H and DoD
- Roaming bandwidth control for GCC-High and DoD
- Dynamic Caller ID for Voice enabled channels, now available for GCC High and DoD
- Up to 25K members per team in DoD
New default for Teams notification style for DoD”
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