Welcome to your monthly round-up of all the latest features and updates from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This month we bring you AI noise suppression, polls, call merge, a new site performance page, and more.
What’s New in Microsoft Teams – December Updates
AI-based noise suppression
The new real-time AI noise suppression feature removes unwelcome background noise during your Teams meetings. It does this by analysing your audio feed, and filtering out the noise, and only retaining only the speech signal. This feature can be controlled by the meeting participant and can be varied depending on the setting they are in, and how much noise suppression they are looking for.
Polls in Teams Meetings
Powered by Forms, Polls in Teams meetings is a seamless experience that helps you conduct a more engaging and productive meeting. The meeting organiser or presenter can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls, before during, or after a meeting. These are easy to view and respond to as they appear in a pop-up bubble or chat pane. To enable this feature, simply add the Forms app as a tab in your Teams meeting.
Call Merge
Whilst on a call with a colleague, a client, or a group, you may want to add another expert to participate in the call. Similarly, you may receive an incoming call that makes sense to connect with the one you’re already on. Call merge gives your end-users, the ability to merge Teams VoIP and PSTN 1-1 call into another 1-1 call or another group call. To do this, simply choose the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”.
More options to use polls, surveys & checklists in Teams
You can easily gather information or manage that information in chat and channels utilising the new app templates for polls, surveys, and checklists in Teams. Once installed and configured by your Teams administrators, these extensions provide a simple and intuitive experience for users across all platforms without the need to use third-party apps.
What’s New in SharePoint – December Updates
SharePoint Site performance page
This new page helps editors and owners make impactful page improvements to increase both site health and overall performance. Page health measures performance which impacts the users viewing experience and the page’s ability to engage viewers and serve its purpose.
It provides actionable feedback on aspects of a page or certain site assets that may benefit from a content delivery network, what web parts and how their usage might be impacting page load times, like images that are too large, requests going to the back end, and other potential problems.
At-a-glance and key points in sharing emails
When a user decides to share a word file with a colleague via email, the sharing email will now contain information about the estimated time it should take to read it as well as a list of the key points in the document.
These insights can help those who receive it quickly determine if the file is relevant to them and can save a lot of time for those in email triage.
Updated SharePoint tab app in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft has improved the SharePoint tab experience for those adding pages, document libraries, or lists to a channel in Teams. The updated experience makes it easy to select multiple content types from the connected team site or by providing a link to any list, page, or library to which the user has access.
They have also added a new recommended section in the SharePoint tab, to help find relevant content from their sites to pin to their channels.
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.