Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you content from camera in Teams Meetings, “top hits” in your Teams Search Bar, Viva Suite, private drafts in SharePoint, new governance features in the SharePoint admin centre, and more.
What’s New in Microsoft Teams
Content from camera
Content from camera in Teams facilitates intelligent capture which allows you to share content from physical whiteboards in office spaces and documents at home in a high-quality way during meetings. You can use the camera on your laptop, a secondary USB webcam, or a separate document camera. Just like the current experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms, the intelligent content capture technology will detect, crop, and frame the asset while enhancing the content in the video stream. People standing in front of the asset can even be made transparent so attendees can see the content clearly.
Custom Music on Hold
A recent update allows tenant administrators to configure the audio being played to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) callers whenever they are placed on hold. This enables entire departments, functions, or a group of users to customise announcements being played to PSTN callers on hold.
To turn on this feature, admins simply need to upload the audio file, configure the Teams hold policy referencing the audio file, and assign the policy to groups of users.
‘Top hits’ provides a new search result section
Microsoft is making it easier for you to search and find the information you need by introducing “top hits” on Teams.
This new addition appears at the top of your auto-suggest results. Top hits pull together the most relevant results for you across different search domains—people, group chats, teams, channels, and files—and reduce the need to scroll through all the search results, meaning you can find what you need when you need it.
Updated search results page in Teams
In a similar vein, we are about to see a new search experience in Teams that will make finding messages sent in chat, people, and files faster and more intuitive.
The redesigned search results page provides faster results, and it now features AI-powered relevance based on the people and content you engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.
What’s New in SharePoint
The Viva Suite is Now Widely Available
Microsoft has just announced that all four Viva modules —Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning are now available with the purchase of just one plan, Viva suite. Below we explore several newly announced capabilities and partnerships for each module, as well as their new centralised IT experience for admins.
In 2022, the Viva suite will facilitate access to a new module designed to help people and teams build alignment and achieve better business outcomes. Keep your eyes peeled for updates!
Further updates to the Viva Suite Include:
- Viva Insights: New manager insights and tools, and a new effective meetings experience
- Viva Topics: Viva Topics will now be integrated into Outlook, Yammer, Bing, and more. Also, by the end of 2021, there will be more ways for topic managers to oversee knowledge at scale, including automatic grouping of topics into segments, usage analytics, and a streamlined topic centre.
- Viva Learning: Soon you will be able to see assignments from integrated Learning Management Systems, allowing you to stay up to date on required learning. As well as a feature to search across all the learning sources
- Viva Connections: recent updates include a streamlined setup for Connections in Teams, innovative mobile experiences, and new capabilities for extending the feed and dashboard components,
Private drafts for SharePoint pages and news
The latest update means you can create private drafts for pages or news articles. This goes for both content authors and admins. Whenever a private draft is created, only the creator and site admins can see the page. The creator can then share the private draft with other people to allow them to access and edit the page.
This is the perfect way to collaborate in private before you communicate or share updates across the broader domain.
SharePoint spaces have a new Embed web part
SharePoint space users will now be able to insert HTML pages as web parts. Space viewers will see a thumbnail image in the 3D space that can be viewed as a fully functional HTML overlay.
This will allow you to add content such as:
- The PowerPoint embed viewer
- Microsoft Forms
- SharePoint pages
- And Power Apps
SharePoint Framework v1.13
The new Framework gives developers the ability to build experiences for Connections, as well as improvements and fixes for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint development. In it, you’ll find, the general availability of Adaptive Card Extensions – applicable to Connection’s desktop and mobile, support for version 1.10 of Teams JS client SDK, support for version 3.9 of TypeScript, support for version 2.9 of the Adaptive Card SDK, the release of image rendering APIs, and so much more.
SharePoint admin centre: Teams channel site management
You may have heard that Teams has officially become the world’s largest collaboration platform. With the platforms rapidly growing adoption rates, Microsoft listened to the communities’ feedback and has worked to simplify management of the Teams and Channel connected team sites. Meaning, when you go to a teams-connected site in the SharePoint admin centre, you can now see all corresponding channel sites and ensure that the right optional security policies are inherited from the parent site.
Related Technology
Office.com updates
Office.com, the Office mobile app, and desktop apps impart intelligence into the overall content experience. Meaning you can stay on top of your tasks, get access to all your tools, and quickly act without leaving your workflow. It helps you start your day or helps you get back to your work. You can also launch an app, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Microsoft Teams, use Search to look for Apps, Files, People, and Sites – and more.
The new features include:
- Recommended actions to join your next meeting, complete a To-Do task, or reply to a comment you were at-mentioned in.
- View an infinite list of your content to see all the things you’ve been working.
- Browse by people and meetings. The people’s view is great if you know who shared a file with you but don’t recall the name of the file. And when you browse by meetings, you see a history of your meetings and all the related content.
- New create experience behind the plus sign to start creating. You can start from a template or by the type of content. The new Create goes beyond common Office files; you can start a Form, a list, or post for Yammer. You can create files using templates, even company-branded templates, and more.
Generate captions on-demand for Stream videos stored in SharePoint and OneDrive locations
If you don’t have a transcript and have edit permission to a video, you will be able to use the Transcript and captions setting within the player to generate captions in English. Once the transcript has been generated, the user can refresh the page to see the file and turn on Transcript and captions to display the file as closed captions for their video. Users will also be able to delete the caption file. Any viewer will be able to enable captions during playback via the Closed Captions button.
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.