Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft. It’s been a strange month with COVID-19 dominating the headlines and changing the way business’s function and utilise their Microsoft packages. This month we bring you a range of new features which can improve your utilisation of your current software including Bookings, Raise hands and Teams and Skype interoperability.
Teams and Skype Interoperability
Rolling out at the end of March you will be the ability to contact Skype users on Teams and vice versa. This is a highly anticipated feature as it allows you to contact members on another platform whist still utilising the features of Teams. You will be able to find contacts by email address, Skype ID is due to follow in a later development.
It’s also worth reiterating however that Skype for Business (SfB) is being phased out and will no longer exist from 31 July 2021. Microsoft Teams offers so much more than SfB and has been built from the ground up for business use. If you’re needing to move to Teams, we can help. Whether you need Business Voice or just the platform, find out about the services we offer or contact us today.
Bookings App
With more meetings taking place online, it can be tricky to access everyone through the same platform. With the new Bookings App in teams, you can invite external users to attend your call in Microsoft Teams. This could be hugely useful for job interviews, meetings with suppliers or contacting and presenting to clients. This will be rolled out in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for it.
Raise Hands
Excuse me! The new Microsoft Teams feature “raise hands” allows meeting attendees to signal that they have something to add to the conversation.
It can be difficult to contribute to a group call with lots of people talking and to wanting to interrupt so this new feature will aid collaboration as more of us work from home.
Pop-out Teams Chats
It can get a bit busy with multiple teams and chats going on at the same time. Now you can make it a bit easier to manage with Pop outs so you can see more than one chat at a time to help keep on top of all the conversations you are in.
Smart Upload Management
You can now automatically adjust sync upload rate based on bandwidth availability. This setting enables OneDrive sync client to upload data in the background by only consuming unused bandwidth and not interfere with other applications using the network. When the network bandwidth gets freed up, OneDrive sync client will ramp up upload rate and consume the unused bandwidth. This allows you to better utilise your bandwidth.
Modernising SharePoint Managed Metadata Services
For companies, finding and governing content is vital to maximising productivity. Content metadata; including properties, attributes, columns, terms or tags, is essential for information architecture, workflow, and compliance.
Managed Metadata Service (MMS) delivers management of tags, terms and content types. In April, there will be a number of enhancements released including a modern term management system, a modern content type gallery to create and manage content types in the content hub and an update to the tagging and filtering interface for MMS columns in lists and libraries. Importantly, these features will require no migration or changes to the data in your existing MMS but will unlock new capabilities for admins.
We hope this new feature breakdown was useful, and you can utilise some of the above features to improve usability and employee experience. We regularly share tips on how to make the most out of both Microsoft SharePoint and Teams on LinkedIn and Twitter, you can follow us here or you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter to get these tips directly in your inbox.