Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you live reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings, improved webinar set up, view switcher, and Viva Topics.
What’s new in Teams?
View Switcher
Coming Q2, a new view switcher at the top of your Teams meeting screen will allow you to control how you view the meeting. It allows you to pick from several options such as Together Mode, Gallery at Top, Focus, and Full Screen, each provides a different view based on your unique preference. For those who like to naturally interact without visual distractions, Together Mode is a great choice. If you are looking to have a more natural eye gaze, we recommend putting the Gallery at the Top. Focus hides all videos so you can focus solely on what is being presented. Whichever way you prefer to work, there is a view for you.
Live Reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings
If it fits with your company culture, you can now use emojis to react during a meeting. It’s a fun way to promote inclusivity in meetings, whilst keeping the tone upbeat and interactions. These features and now widely available.
Attendee registration and email confirmations
Teams has become the go-to platform for many looking to run live events, and whilst the production capabilities are exceptional, the setup process hasn’t always been the easiest. Coming early 2021, planning, setting up, and running webinars will be just as easy as meetings in Teams. You can easily create a custom registration page for your webinar and manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees receive an automatic confirmation for a simple join experience.
Microsoft Teams Connect
Teams connect makes it easy to share channels with anyone, internal or external. This shared channel will appear within your Teams tenant alongside your existing channels, so it fits easily into your existing workflow. In the shared workspace, you can leverage all of the Teams features you use to including chat, meet, call, share, and co-author documents in real-time. Admins have access to granular controls, allowing the organisation to stay in control of what information and data is shared and accessible.
What’s new in SharePoint?
Microsoft Viva Topics (general availability)
Topics are the first product output from Project Cortex. Project Cortex is designed to utilise artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day and to connect, manage, and protect content across systems and teams. There are three more modules in the Microsoft Viva pipeline. You can learn more about Viva Topics here.
Microsoft Lists | New thousands separator and custom symbols in Number columns
With Microsoft Lists and SharePoint lists, owners and members can now add a thousands separator to numbers and to be able to choose their preferred symbol that best represents what the numbers represent – like the various currency symbols used across the world.
Microsoft Search in classic SharePoint sites
This is a quick and simple one, with lots of power for sites that have been around a while and may still be in classic mode. We are expanding the reach of Microsoft Search; classic SharePoint team sites that do not have customised search experience will be updated to the modern Microsoft Search experience, bringing improved personalisation and relevance.
We hope this new feature breakdown was useful, and you can utilise some of the above features to improve useability 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.