At the Inspire 2022 partner conference, Microsoft announced a whole host of new features for teams. This is intended to promote distributed collaboration.
At its partner conference Inspire 2022, Microsoft announced many new functions for its communication tool Teams, some of which are to be available now and some in the next few months. The focus is on the increased hybrid cooperation between companies.
They want to continue working on “putting teams at the center of the hybrid work journey”, as Microsoft put it in the blog post accompanying the announcement. To do this, a number of new collaboration options are integrated into teams. In virtual meetings, all participants can edit the workbooks of the spreadsheet software via Excel Live – natively and without separate Excel instances. The feature will be available from August.
Microsoft is also praising the new “collaborative annotations”, which, once activated, will immediately enable all call participants to make annotations on split screens. The tools are based on Microsoft Whiteboard and are intended to lead to more lively discussions about what is being shared.
Intensify cooperation with external parties
Cooperation across company boundaries should also become easier in teams in the future. With “shared channels”, several companies and institutions can use their teams channels together from July. So far, teams have mostly remained in their own company silo outside of individual chats and calls.
Microsoft apparently sees an attractive business area in virtual courses and is therefore expanding the webinar functions in teams that were introduced last May. Among other things, the presenters can now natively post a short biography there, including a profile picture and graphic theme according to their corporate identity.
On the hardware side, Microsoft announced further collaborations with manufacturers of intelligent cameras with AI functions – including Logitech, Jabra and Huddly – and of dedicated Teams displays, including Yealink DeskVision A24 and the Neat Frame. Microsoft lists the full list of announcements in a blog post. The company holds the Inspire conference annually.
