Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you meeting recap, touch bar controls for Macs in Microsoft Teams meetings, Viva Connections, SharePoint Focus Mode, SharePoint Analytics, and a SharePoint App Bar.

What’s new in Teams?

Meeting recap

The improved meeting recap functionality helps teams stay on track and keep their work moving, following a meeting. It includes a recording of the meeting, a transcript so you can easily highlight any tasks that arose, chat, any shared files, and more. The recap is shared with participants within the Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab. Those who couldn’t make the meeting or joined late, or want to revisit what was discussed can review the recap whenever it suits their schedule.

Touch Bar meetings control on Mac

MacBooks with Touch Bars can now allow users to access controls quickly without clicking into the window. Users can open the ‘view participants’ panel, open meeting chat, use raise hand, enable video, mute/unmute, open shared tray, and leave the meeting from one place.

Voice-enabled channels

Voice-enabled channels can now connect a call queue to a channel in Microsoft Teams. This means your users can collaborate and share information, and expertise within the channel while taking calls in the queue. This feature is ideal for IT help desks or HR hotlines. It’s easy for IT admins to quickly connect call queues to specific channels, and then team owners can manage the settings.

250 GB file size support in Microsoft teams

Microsoft has now increased the file size for Teams from 100 GB to 250 GB. This update also includes files shared and saved on SharePoint and OneDrive. This is ideal for people sharing large files like a 3D model of a new building, a client ad shot in 8K video, a large dataset for a vaccine trial or research projects, or large videos for educational projects.

Viva Connections on Teams desktop

Viva Connections is your gateway to a better employee experience. It is personalised and appears in the apps and devices your employees already use every day, such as Microsoft Teams. Viva Connections gives people a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.

What’s new in SharePoint?

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences

Building your intelligent intranet on SharePoint enables businesses, like yours to experience a range of benefits from reducing IT and development costs, to increasing business speed and agility, and more importantly leveling up the dynamic, personalised, and welcoming nature of your intranet.

SharePoint app bar that features global navigation

Admins will soon be able to add a SharePoint app bar to their SharePoint modern communication and team sites. This will provide quick access to customisable global navigation as well as other intranet resources and will be accessible for users wherever they are in SharePoint.

Focus mode for modern SharePoint pages

Microsoft has recently announced Focus mode for SharePoint. It allows SharePoint page authors and viewers to focus on a greater amount of page content by hiding the site header, site navigation, and global navigation bar with one click. Another click brings back all when you ready to un-focus and move on.

SharePoint Page Analytics updates

For site performance, and improved usage, it’s important to understand the content that your readers engage with to help refine how and what you post in the future. To help, Microsoft is introducing analytics for SharePoint pages and news articles. Page authors and site admins will soon be able to see the number of viewers, in addition to seeing information about how users interact with your page or news.

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.