Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you webinar registration and reporting, wellbeing insights, SharePoint Home Sites in Teams and PowerBI results in Microsoft Search.
What’s new in Teams – October Updates
Custom presenter layouts
Custom layouts allow for a more exciting and dynamic content viewing experience for your audience. They enable presenters to customise how content shows up for participants during a meeting. If, for example, the presenter wanted to showcase a PowerPoint, participants will be able to see the presenter’s video feed transposed on the foreground of the slide they are showing.
Meeting recap
Coming later this year, a recap of Team meeting will be available in both the chat tab and the meeting event in your Outlook Meeting recaps help teams stay on track and keep work moving in the right direction after a meeting is concluded, for both attendees and for participants who were unable to attend. This recap will include a meeting recap, transcript, chat, shared file, and more.
Webinar registration and reporting
For more structured meetings or events, such as webinars or live events with customers, meeting organisers can utilise event registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage and track attendance. After the meeting, organisers will be able to view a detailed reporting dashboard that will help to gauge attendee engagement rates. These new features should be available in the next couple of months. With more webinars planned for the future, we really can’t wait for this update to hit Microsoft Teams.
Collaborative calling
Collaborative calling allows customers to connect to a call queue to a channel in Teams. Users can collaborate and share information on the Team channel while taking calls in the queue. This feature is ideal for IT help desks or HR hotline, IT admins can quickly connect call queues to specific channels and team owners can manage the settings.
Wellbeing and productivity insights in Teams
Powered by MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics, wellbeing and productivity insights are coming to Teams. Employees, managers, and business leaders will all receive personalised insights unique to their role, with recommended actions on to make changing habits and improving productivity and wellbeing easier. Additionally, new personal wellbeing experience including a virtual commute to add structure to your remote working day and access to Headspace guided meditations to help you unwind will be available in the first half of 2021.
What’s New In SharePoint – October Updates
SharePoint Homesite in Teams
The new home site app brings the SharePoint home site experience and an organisations intranet directly into the Teams app, giving the employee a gateway to their organisations intranet without even opening a browser, bringing customisable naming, branding, and multi-level navigation to teams, communities, and resources.
Expiring external guest access to documents
SharePoint site administrators will now receive email notifications advising of any upcoming guest SharePoint or OneDrive documents access expirations. However, it is important to note that this policy is not retroactive, it doesn’t apply to guests who have access to sites, documents, and files before this setting is applied. After a guest loses access to the site, any user with the ability to share content with external partners can re-invite the guests to each document or item as needed.
PowerBI results coming to MS Search in SharePoint
Data visualisations are a key type of content when using search to determine questions and weigh outcomes. When you search for anything in MS Search in SharePoint or Office.com, it will now pull relevant reports, dashboards, and workplaces from PowerBI.
SharePoint sites get the new list creating experience
SharePoint lists experience their first big step in the evolution to Microsoft Lists, and administrators and creators need to nothing but enjoy the update. Individuals will now be able to create lists from eight build-in templates from SharePoint sites. Existing list creation flows will be refreshed to align with the updates that users are already seeing as part of the Microsoft Lists app in Microsoft 365 and when creating Lists in Microsoft Teams.
We hope you found these insights useful and hope they will enable your business to work more effectively and productively. If you are looking to make use of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or would like to know how you can make the most of any of the new features mentioned, contact us for a no-obligation chat.