With Microsoft ignite sessions that happened last week there are lots of new end users functionalities, meeting room enhancements and better enhanced administration facilities were announced for Microsoft Teams. Below are the summary of the features .

Watch out more from the Ignite Session videos.

End user functionalities –
1)Ability to create Private Channels – Secure Private channels can be created and shared only with few audiences.This eliminates the need of creating multiple teams for secure communication. We can further restrict the Private Channels creation and visibility from the admin center.
2)Multi window experience between the chats – Ability to chat with multiple people at the same time and switch windows which was much requested feature in the user voice.
3)New Tasks experience in Teams – Helps better tracking of the tasks and have great option to view the stats on charts, schedule, boards and filter.
4)Yammer app in Teams – Allows to jump in yammer communities.Beneficiary especially on larger organizations and useful for employees to join and collaborate in a bigger communities and keep upto date on the new content.
5)Outlook addin for Teams – With the new addin it makes easier for sending the content of the email with all the context body and attachments. Sharing from channels have also been seamless.
6)Background Blur to the next level- We can add customize background blur with our custom images and change the background experience either to show as sitting on a beach or in a hotel etc.,
7)Turn on live captions – It makes easier to follow up on the team meetings. This is a live voice to text translation and helps especially in broadcast meetings as well.

Lot of innovations on Meeting experience –

1)New compact devices – Newly launched Yealink & Polycom Collaboration bars suitable for smaller huddle spaces. It has exciting remote control with which we can join the meeting without the need of Touch Panels and just mounting them on a normal LED TV.

2)Cloud Video Interoperability with Cisco -Cisco webex video devices and cisco SIP conferencing video devices can connect with Microsoft Teams Meeting services. Cisco interop service and will be classified as teams cloud video interop solution.This helps out customers consuming cisco partnership to utilize cisco devices in Teams.

3)Cisco/Zoom Web based interoperability – Interop meeting room devices with direct guest join which enables the user to choose and utilize Teams,Cisco or Zoom from web interfaces however this experience will be seamless to the end users from these devices.

4)Managed Meeting Rooms – Monitor and manage your meeting rooms is a managed service from Microsoft that does room monitoring and advanced insights.

New IT professional capabilities –

1)Easier deployment of Teams Deploying Teams Workload –

Adviser for teams helps easier deployment and customize plans of choosing which one to migrate first whether chats or channel conversations or meeting or conversation.New coexistence modes added to support better coexistence and transition with Skype for Business Enterprise Voice functionalities.

2)ATP is now available in Teams- With ATP enabled Teams does a time of click verification for the links sent in chat conversations and if it finds anything phishy it does block them as we get on email links.

3)Ediscovery Available from Microsoft Teams – We can submit information for ediscovery on Teams contents.

4)Teams Audit logs – With Teams audit logs we can provide information on whether the Message was deleted or edited.

5)Information Barrier – Ability to block the communication between critical users from the admin side.The same capability will be applicable for files sharing between them in Teams.

6)Retention Policies – In Microsoft Teams now we can Setup retention policies that are as low as 1 day.

7)Administration for Microsoft Teams –

8)PowerShell – Bulk update to security group is possible with new commandlets and just now one liner.

9)Hub for Teamwork – Certified app catalog available in the teams admin center and further iteration can be made on this app catalog.

10)Manage Microsoft Teams Rooms – From Teams admin center we have the capability to manage the Microsoft teams meeting rooms devices.We have the capability to restart the devices and troubleshoot them from the admin center.

11)First line workers in Microsoft Teams –
Time Clock in Teams and Shifts in Teams helps managing the first line workers efficiently and tracking them easily.With graph apis we can integrate our workforce management systems.

12)Delegated User Management – First line workers managers have the capacity to reset/block the user accounts.

New Identity and access capabilities for First line workers-
SMS signin
Global sign-out
Off-shift access