As is the case every month, Microsoft has published a roundup of all the new features added to its Teams collaboration platform in November. First of all, the company has just launched new Loop components in Teams chats to help users communicate and work remotely together. This feature is now available in the Teams desktop and mobile apps.
“Loop components in Teams chat (rolling out now for our Microsoft 365 commercial customers) offer a new way to think, plan, and create together. Send a component—like a table, task list, or paragraph—where everyone in your chat can edit inline and see changes as they are made. This makes it incredibly easy to share thoughts, make decisions, collect data, and track progress together and in the flow of your work,” the company explained in a blog post.
In addition to Loop components, Microsoft Teams has added a new search results page that should make finding people, messages, answers, as well as files faster and more intuitive than ever before. This redesigned search results page provides AI-powered filtering capabilities, faster results, and easier navigation to the underlying items. A new Top Hits section has been added at the top of the search suggestions that lists the most relevant search results.
CART Captions in Teams meetings and more
Earlier this month, Microsoft introduced integrated CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning support in Teams Meetings. This capability allows users to view live captions from a CART provider directly within the meeting window. The feature should help teams with different language proficiency levels connect via video streams.
Next up, Microsoft Teams picked up a new “Content from camera” feature that lets presenters stream high-quality content directly from physical artifacts, including documents and whiteboards. There are also improvements to the polling capabilities in Teams meetings, with a new feature that lets users ask an open-ended question and view responses in a word cloud.
Other updates
For education users, Microsoft has detailed a new Whiteboard integration in Teams that lets teachers add a whiteboard as reference material to assignments. Additionally, it is now possible to include links to add content from EdTech apps (including BookWidgets and Flipgrid) directly into Teams assignments. Microsoft is also expanding the availability of Cortana to education customers in international markets.
Last but not least, the Redmond giant has unveiled some new management capabilities for Teams devices, including a remote sign-out option. There are some new Teams-certified devices such as the UVC86, a new dual-eye tracking camera for medium and large conference rooms, and you can find more details on this page.
