5 Microsoft Teams Features We Love

Some of us have been using Microsoft Teams since its inception in 2017. Some started this year. Regardless, it is clear that the ease of collaboration and visibility afforded by Teams have secured this platform a rank at the top of the modern business tech stack. Forrester found that executives and decision makers improve their time-to-decision by 17.7% with Teams. Plus, with 75 million daily active users, Microsoft has voiced its commitment to continually improving the feature-rich platform.

Features we currently love

• “Blur my background” has always been handy, but now Microsoft has made it even easier to add your own custom background. In Background settings, where you would go to blur a background or choose one of the provided landscapes, select “Add new” to upload your own .JPG, .PNG, or .BMP file.

• Double click any chat in your chat list to pop out a separate window for that chat. Continue your conversations while you work in Teams or elsewhere.

• Raise your hand in a meeting (by toggling the hand icon next to the ellipses in the control bar) if you have a question or comment but do not want to interrupt the current conversation. We’ve also used this feature as a way for FMT speakers to take informal polls.

• We’re happy to see that the much requested 3x3 grid is here. But what’s even more exciting is that Microsoft has confirmed that a gallery view showing 49 participants is on the Teams roadmap.

• The Power BI/Teams integration is improving. When users share a chart in a Teams conversation, Teams includes a thumbnail preview of the data.

Features we’re looking forward to

• We’ll soon see a channel information pane. Selecting the “channel info” icon in a channel header will display a summary of information related to that channel such as the description, a list of recent contributors and members, and system messages.

• Users will also be able to keep important information top of mind with pinned posts. Just pin any message within a channel to the channel information pane for all members of the channel to see. We should see both features this month, June 2020.

Microsoft Teams has expertly positioned companies to facilitate collaboration from anywhere. If you have Teams but would like help with user training or security measures, or if you are still evaluating enterprise-wide deployment, let us know how we can help.  FMT has assembled an offer to quickly activate Teams within your organization. And we'd love to speak with you . . . via Teams.