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 pin or hide your own video in Teams meetings, to mute notifications during meetings, new content scenarios for the My Feed Web Part on SharePoint, updates to Viva Topics, and more.
What’s New in Teams?
Pin or hide your own video in Teams meetings
Microsoft have expanded the ability to pin your own video on the meeting stage. This way, you can see your own video in the increased size on your screen. Or if you would rather remove the distraction of looking at yourself, you also can hide your own video during a meeting on others’ screens. This will reduce distractions during calls while still having your video available for other participants.
To pin or hide your video, simply click on the ellipsis (…) in your video feed and select Pin for me or Hide for me.
Support open-text question poll for Teams meeting
There is a new way to use Microsoft Forms to engage your attendees – Word Cloud Poll. You can use this type of poll to collect open-ended responses before, during, or after a meeting, and the results will be automatically aggregated and displayed as a word cloud.
Meeting improvements on Android
Enjoy better meeting experiences in Teams Rooms on Android—with more videos on the screen, the ability to spotlight several participants at once, new reactions, and more. Most notably, with the new and improved meeting experience, videos of remote participants span both screens (in meeting rooms with dual screens) when content is not being shared.
Pairing the channel with the corresponding SharePoint folder
When renaming a Teams channel, the corresponding SharePoint folder will also be renamed to reflect the change. This will help create consistency across Microsoft 365 endpoints, making it easier for users to find their files from anywhere.
This new feature will be available for all Standard and Private channels. For Standard channels – The corresponding folder in SharePoint will be renamed. For Private channels – The corresponding site name and the folder in SharePoint will be renamed.
For legacy Teams channels that were renamed prior to this rollout, there will be no change in experience. When a legacy channel is renamed after this release, it will simultaneously rename the corresponding SharePoint folder.
Mute Notifications During Meetings
Users will be able to mute notifications during meetings thereby helping focus during meetings. A user can choose to mute notifications for all meetings or per meeting basis.
To turn off notifications during all meetings, go to settings -> notifications-> meetings and calls and toggle the Mute Notifications during meeting button.
Local time added to people profile
We often work in distributed teams. To help you with scheduling messages, quickly check your colleague’s time zone, right from their contact card, enabling you to time your messages to get faster responses, while being considerate of your colleagues’ schedule.
Chat density
Depending on your monitor size and viewing preference, you might want to change the amount of spacing that appears in chat messages. Whether you want to optimise to see more text at once or read less text at a more comfortable level, Teams lets you customise the chat density to suit your needs.
Click on ‘settings’ -> ‘general’ and choose the right spacing for you. The chat density feature lets you customize the number of chat messages you see on the screen with different settings. The compact setting lets you minimise the need to scroll up and down by fitting 50% more messages on the screen. The comfortable setting keeps the chat display as it is in Teams today.
What’s New in SharePoint?
New Content Scenarios for My Feed Web Part on SharePoint
The My feed web part is the pathway to a very personalised experience in your intranet. By adding a My feed web part to a broader communication site – such as a home site, or an intranet in Teams – aka, Viva Connections. The feed knows who is signed in and shows them content and activities relevant to them.
This month’s update brings the following into the My feed feed:
- Suggested Tasks
These are tasks or actions you have requested or have been requested for you or tasks you have committed to – pulling tasks from your email conversations. - People Highlights
Bringing in Birthdays, Work Anniversaries, and Changes of roles for people who you work with. This information is only visible to those who have chosen to share it on LinkedIn. - Meetings out of routine
These are meetings scheduled on Teams or Outlook and are out of your usual working hours. This allows your users to either request a reschedule or act on the meetings as appropriate.
Viva Topics: Use Syntex taxonomy to generate topics
Microsoft Viva Topics and SharePoint Syntex customers can build on their existing investments in classifying and organising content with the ability to use the taxonomy service in Syntex and SharePoint to generate topics.
This new integration uses the term names, including those you are already using with SharePoint Syntex, descriptions, synonyms, and tagged files to create topics that the AI can use as a seed to discover additional connections with people and files.
Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 connected templates
When you create a new team using a default template – for example, the “Manage a Project” template, the project management channels and apps, and the connected SharePoint template will get applied automatically. Now, the pages, lists, and Power Platform integrations from SharePoint will be automatically pinned as tabs in Teams and you can edit these pages and lists directly in Teams.
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.