Microsoft has outlined all the new features Teams gained in February and March, including live transcriptions, meeting recaps, a Teams and Outlook Calendar integration, and updates for Android devices and iPads.
As many office workers continue to work from home, collaboration tools like Teams have become increasingly popular. Microsoft Teams earlier this month gained live transcriptions with speaker attribution, as well as a meeting recap feature that includes a meeting recording, transcript, chat, attached files and so on.
Outlook users can now start an instant Teams meeting from the Calendar tab in Outlook for Windows. To start a meeting, users can click Meet Now.
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It’s now also possible to copy a Meet Now link from the Teams Calendar without starting a meeting right away. This makes it easier to share a link in email or chat.
At the Ignite conference earlier this month, Microsoft released PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, its take on PowerPoint for presentations in Teams remote meetings. It allows users to open presentations in Teams without needing to open a PowerPoint deck and share the screen.
Teams also gained a “presenter mode” that’s meant to be used with PowerPoint Live and displays the speaker at the bottom of slide as they go through slides. Viewers also now have a few more emoticons to share reactions as they listen to a presentation, such as clap and heart.
For webinars, Teams users can now host 20,000 people in view-only broadcasts, and the ability to download attendance reports.
Meanwhile, meeting participants on a mobile connection can now fire up the new low data calling mode.
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Continuing on the Teams mobile app, Teams on Android will now let meeting attendees see up to 20 participants on a phone and up to 30 participants on a tablet. Android users can now see shared content and a spotlighted speaker simultaneously.
Teams users with an iPad Pro or iPad Air can now present live in Teams from the device by selecting ‘Join as presenter’ to start a broadcast.
Finally, Microsoft has bumped up the file-sharing size limit in Teams from 100 GB to 250 GB, making it easier to share 3D model designs, 8K video files, and large datasets for research and educational projects. The new limit applies to all Microsoft 365 services. The full list of additions to Teams can be found here.
