At Microsoft Build 2020, we unveiled a new range of tools and services to meet developers’ needs for providing impact and value. Among the major news highlights were new features and capabilities in Microsoft Teams.
As a hub for teamwork combining meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed, here’s everything you need to know on the latest updates for Microsoft Teams:
Enhance productivity
Create teams quickly with customizable templates. Each template comes with pre-defined channels, apps, and guidance. Admins will also be able to create new custom templates and templatize existing teams in their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months and appear automatically.
Drive automation with virtual agents
Integrating with Teams is also easier than ever: Just select the bot you want to use and then click Add to Teams. For additional convenience, Power Virtual Agents now supports single sign-on (SSO), so users will no longer have to reauthenticate when using Teams for the first time.
Admins will soon be able to add their custom applications from Power Apps to Teams with a single click of the Add to Teams button. To get started, open make.powerapps.com, click “… “next to the canvas app you’d like to publish and select Add to Teams.
Users can now share reports, or specific charts in reports, to Teams with the new Share to Teams button. Senders can also direct the recipient’s attention to a specific chart in a report or share it with an entire team. To get started, select Send to Teams from the Power BI portal and type in the team name you’d like to share with.
Plan and schedule
Organizations will now be able to schedule, manage, and conduct business-to-consumer virtual appointments through the new Bookings app integration in Microsoft Teams. With a single scheduling experience, you can manage multiple departments or locations and securely host everything from candidate interviews and student office hours to financial consultations and medical visits.
Teams support HIPAA compliance and are HITRUST certified. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will make it easier for healthcare organizations to remain agile and focus on what they do best – delivering better experiences, insights, and care.
New capabilities in the Shifts app extends functionality and enables integration with existing systems. New triggers and templates will help support a variety of time-saving and process-optimization scenarios, like enabling auto-approvals for shift requests in scenarios where a manager’s approval is not needed.
For broadcasting events and creating studio productions from a virtual stage, the new Network Device Interface (NDI) support and Skype TX interoperability for Teams will offer a more advanced set of production options. Coming soon, NDI for Microsoft Teams will transform a Teams meeting into a virtual stage by converting each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the production tool of your choice: OBS, Wirecast, Xsplit, StreamLabs, and many more.
