Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you the ability to new Whiteboards in Teams, live transcripts in unscheduled meetings, breakout room manager support, pre-meeting breakout room assignment, new SharePoint Templates, the ability to edit images directly in SharePoint or OneDrive, and more.
What’s New in Microsoft Teams
All-New Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams
The Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams has been completely rebuilt to provide a rich visual collaboration workspace. It features 40+ new customisable templates, with the ability to insert images and shapes, and 8 new reactions, so you can bring your people together in a visual collaboration workspace. You can also insert documents like PowerPoint presentations and add personal notes with 15 new pen and highlighter colours to iterate together and bring your ideas to life.
Live Transcript for unscheduled meetings using Meet Now and Channel meetings
Live Transcript is now available for any ad hoc or Teams Channel meetings. For ad hoc meetings, you will be able to download the transcript from the chat screen after the meeting. For Channel meetings, you can view the transcript under the Recordings & Transcripts tab. To enable this feature, make sure the Allow Transcription policy is turned on.
Breakout Room managers support
Microsoft has now added the ability for a meeting organiser to extend the management of breakout rooms to presenters. By taking control from the breakout rooms management panel, appointed presenters will be able to perform breakout room operations as managers or meeting organisers, and join rooms as a breakout room manager. Only participants who are named as presenters can be appointed as breakout room managers.
Breakout room pre-meeting room creation and participant assignment
Meeting organisers are now able to perform breakout room configurations and participant assignment tasks prior to meetings in the Teams desktop app. You can create rooms in bulk, add or delete individual rooms, configure meeting options, adjust session settings like timer, and pre-assign participants via both manual and automatic assignment options. At this time, only invited attendees – up to 300 participants, will be available for pre-assignment.
1:1 Calling in Safari Web Browser
You can now make 1:1 calls from Teams to Safari. Users can now initiate a 1:1 call with another user while using Teams on Safari. Users can initiate a 1:1 call from the Calls App or the Call button in the header of a 1:1 chat.
Chat supervisors can delete messages
Learning online can be personal, engaging, and socially enriching when educators and teachers use Teams chats, channels, and meetings to stay in touch. However, online learning can also present unique student safety challenges. This feature, designed with our Teams for Education users in mind, allows chat supervisors to delete inappropriate, off-topic, or other messages in a Teams chat.
What’s New in SharePoint
New SharePoint Site templates – for retail, healthcare, and non-profit
The latest update will bring three new SharePoint site templates to retail customers, non-profits, and healthcare organisations. All allow organisations to better track, manage information, and collaborate.
Here are a few highlights about each:
- Retail: The new retail management and store collaboration templates allow retail employees to manage the store operation more efficiently and foster a better collaboration environment.
- Non-profit: The new volunteer centre template will allow organisers to point volunteers to one place to find key information, access learning materials, and connect with other volunteers.
- Healthcare: The new healthcare collaboration template provides medical practices and healthcare agencies with a safe, secure way to share information that can help you provide better patient care and reduce operational costs.
Modern SharePoint site-level term store
We’ve updated the experience when creating and managing site-level taxonomy terms; this matches the previously updated, central term store in the SharePoint admin centre. It’s now easier to navigate your taxonomies and create and edit terms when classifying & discovering your Syntex and SharePoint content.
Edit images in SharePoint and OneDrive
You’ll be able to rotate, crop (both freeform crop and fixed aspect ratio crop) and flip your images – horizontally and vertically. This update also includes options to adjust the light and colour saturation of your images. There is no better feeling than watching an image transform from muted colours and low contrast to richly coloured and stunning. Now it is easy to make those transformations with adjustments for brightness, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and colour saturation.
Calendar view in List web part
Ever wanted to build a mini-dashboard for an internal event or project schedule and needed to represent your list of information as a calendar? The latest SharePoint List web part in Microsoft 365 allows you to display a list from your team or site on a page and customise it with your own title, view, and even size.
It is a great visual tool for internal communications – especially when things are date-driven.
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.