It has been exactly one year since Microsoft Teams first launched, and many organizations have since come on board with the chat-based collaboration tool. To celebrate the moment, Microsoft today detailed some important milestones and the future AI-inspired features planned for the chat-based collaboration tool.
The company shared today that over 200,000 organizations in 181 markets use Microsoft Teams, with customers including NASCAR, Macy’s, and General Motors. With that so, Microsoft is also looking to advance the features of Teams. Features coming in the second quarter of 2018 include cloud recording, inline message translation, Cortana, background blur on video, proximity detections, and more. See more on these features below.
- Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.
- Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
- Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.
- Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.
- Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.
- Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.
Microsoft will also be making Teams the go-to enterprise calling software. The company shared today Teams will pick up consultative transfer and call delegation and federation features. Also coming is a Direct Routing feature which will allow users to use existing telephony infrastructures with Teams.
Additionally, Microsoft is now working with more OEMs (like Lenovo and HP) and partners (like Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom) to make sure Teams is enabled on more calling and meeting room devices. This includes Surface Hub, new desk phones from AudioCodes and Yealink and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom, and Yealink.
These are all definitely some exciting features, helping give Microsoft Teams some more edge over the popular collaboration tool, Slack. You can hear more about these features during Enterprise Connect this week on Wednesday, March 14.
