What's new in Microsoft Teams March 2021

Live transcription with speaker attribution

Microsoft now offers live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings for English (US). Live transcription is a written record of the spoken text that occurs during a meeting. Clearly identifying  each speaker, speech is captured automatically in near real time, and is available during and after the meeting. You can find out more here.

Meeting recap

Meeting recap is available once a meeting is over. Providing the meeting recording, transcript, attached files and chat. The recap is shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab. Those who missed the meeting, joined late, or want to revisit what was discussed, can play the recording, or review the transcripts respectively.

New bypass lobby option

Teams meeting policies have been updated to allow certain groups of users to join meetings directly and bypass the meeting lobby. These are "People in my organisation" and "People in my organisation, trusted organisations and guests". This provides another level of flexibility and security to Teams users.

Dynamic meeting experiences on Android

New meeting experiences on Android devices enables participants to view content, speakers, and attendees all on one screen. Attendees are now able to see up to 20 participants on mobile devices and up to 30 participants on tablets. In addition, attendees are able to view shared content and a spotlighted participant simultaneously, and no longer have to choose between content being presented or pinned speakers.

Live Event presenter for iPad

iPad users now have the ability to present live in Teams from an iPad. Just open the Teams for iPad app and select ‘Join as presenter’ to start broadcasting content to the audience. 

Voice-enabled channels

Voice-enabled channels allow connecting a call queue to a channel in Microsoft Teams. Users can collaborate and share information within the channel while taking calls in the queue. This feature is ideal for scenarios such an IT help desk or HR hotline. IT admins can quickly connect call queues to specific channels, and team owners can manage the settings. 

Survivable Branch Appliance

To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows users to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a network outage. During an outage, the Teams client switches to the SBA automatically and ongoing calls continue without interruptions and no user action is required. Once the Teams client identifies that network connectivity has been restored, normal call functionality is resumed, and any call data records are uploaded to the cloud. 

Balance productivity and wellbeing with Microsoft Viva Insights

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalised insights and actionable recommendations that help everyone in an organisation thrive. For Workplace Analytics customers, manager and leader insights provide visibility into the impact of work patterns on people and the business and can help identify where a change in team and organisational norms could improve wellbeing and business outcomes. Personal insights are visible only to the individual, and for manager and leader insights, customers can rely on safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy by default 

New file sharing experience

File sharing in Microsoft Teams. has been streamlined. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive directly from within your chat.

Add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site

Microsoft is making it even easier to bring SharePoint content into Teams, in the same motion of adding Microsoft Teams to your team site, aka #teamify. As you connect SharePoint to Teams, you choose what lists, libraries, and pages you want to bring into Teams as tabs in the new, default General channel. 

Out of Office

Let others know that you are not available by scheduling an Out of Office message in Teams. This helps set expectations with your colleagues, letting them know that you won’t be able to respond during this time and allows you to take the time off. During this time, your presence status is changed to "Out of Office" and your status message is displayed when someone reaches out to you via chat.

Add a shared calendar to a Teams channel

Create and share a calendar with members of a specific channel. When a channel meeting is created, Teams automatically creates a new post in the channel’s activity feed. Users, who have notifications turned off, will see the event only when they open the channel’s calendar helping you stay up to date with your teams activites. Once a channel event is posted, you can add it to your personal calendar. This feature provides all members within the channel, except guest users, visibility to upcoming events. 

Virtual Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms allows meeting organiser to divide the meeting into smaller groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions. Break out rooms allow greater flexibility on how you want to meet. Organisers can easily jump in between breakout rooms, deliver announcements to all breakout rooms at once, and bring everyone back to the main meeting at any time. Any files from the breakout rooms can be shared in the main meeting and is available afterwards in the meeting chat.