Microsoft has brought a massive change to its Teams video collaboration service. There were changes and improvements both in terms of features and cosmetics along with the introduction of a new section called “App spotlight”.
The first major introduction in the Meetings and Calling section is Live captions with speaker attribution. This lets users see who is speaking along with what’s being said. Being a presenter, users can also pin an individual video feed for all attendees during the call. The pinned individual will be the main video shown to all participants. This feature is limited to PC, Mac, mobile and Microsoft Teams on Windows. A presenter can also prevent others from unmuting during the meeting and enable certain participants to unmute when they raise hands. This will specifically be important for digital classrooms and conferences.
With this, users get Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode in Teams. Users can even let others edit. The meetings and call recording can also be stored in OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, so they can share it with others in future.
In case users want to know how many participants joined the meeting, they can now download a participant report after the meeting within the meeting chat. The firm has added new data into the report that allows them to better manage attendance.
The Spotlight Support feature in Microsoft Teams Rooms lets you (meeting organiser) select a video feed as the spotlight for all attendees. This will become the main video shown to all participants.
In the Chat and Collaboration section, Teams can now allow users to pin any message in a channel. This will appear in the channel’s information pane for all members of that channel. In case they are offline, they can let others know about it by changing the status. And in case they write different messages in different languages, there will be a spell check according to that language for their ease.
Besides a new File Sharing experience and an updated SharePoint pages app, the service can let choose a template while creating a new Team.
Microsoft is also introducing some features to make it more relevant for education purposes. The firm brings Anonymous Grading. Here, the student’s names are anonymised while grading and avatars are temporarily removed. In addition, the platform makes it easier to view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or across all classes.
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