Microsoft Teams – A post Ignite view

For the second time in 2021 Microsoft brought its Ignite conference to the virtual masses.

The first event 2^nd – 4^th March 2021 was a huge success with thousands of people joining keynotes and sessions virtually. As with other Microsoft events a Book of News was released by Microsoft detailing all the announcements.

The second Ignite event of 2021 was held between 2^nd – 4^th November and provided those with a vested interest in Microsoft applications and cloud-based services with an opportunity to understand the direction Microsoft expects the future business landscape and roadmap to take and to back this up where Microsoft are concentrating their efforts. The Book of News for this event covers all the key details and upcoming features and enhancements. 

My colleague Charlie Lee recently published a blog on his take-aways from Microsoft Ignite, but with this post I will dig a little deeper into the new announcements relating to Microsoft Teams and how I envisage these announcements impacting the business landscape. 

Since the world-wide onset of the Coronavirus pandemic back in March 2020, enterprise workforces have had to change their way of working.  This started with mainly remote and now it’s hybrid, which has seen an explosion of users that depend on Microsoft Teams now regularly hit 250 million active user per month. The need for a hybrid workforce is here to stay, with businesses now realising that technology has matured enough to allow its workers to work from any location, anywhere in the world if there is a stable internet connection.

The headline announcements for Microsoft Teams were:

1. Platform enhancements and new collaborative apps
2. Admin centre – enhancements to enable streamlined IT management 
3. Microsoft Teams Connect – collaboration across organisational boundaries
4. Microsoft Teams Rooms and device enhancements
5. Microsoft Teams Mesh
6. New chat features
7. Webinars – enabling more engaging external events
8. Microsoft Loop

Platform enhancements and new collaborative apps

Microsoft Teams is constantly evolving the way that customers and developers alike can surface existing apps and custom apps within teams. Additional enhancements to the platform include:

• Enhanced features to Power Virtual Agents
• The addition of new apps from Atlassian’s Jira Cloud and SAP sales and service core products enhances the collaboration between these apps using teams chat, channels and teams’ meetings
• Teams’ functionality enhancements to provide the ability to embed collaboration in SaaS applications using Azure Communication Services Teams Interoperability.
• A re-designed app store
• Teams chat connectivity with Dynamics 365

The possibilities for collaboration across Line of Business (LOB) is growing at an ever-increasing rate as customers identify and require greater, smoother connectivity and collaboration between all their apps whilst using the Teams platform to surface and adopt these demands for their end users. 

One application to rule them all is quickly becoming reality.

Of significant interest to us here at Cielo Costa is the introduction of Teams chat connectivity with Dynamics 365 and how this can be leveraged and introduced into our clients using Dynamics 365.  

Want to know how Cielo Costa can assist you with Dynamics 365 and/or migrating from legacy Dynamics applications to Dynamics 365? Book an envisioning call to find out how we can help.

Admin centre enhancements – enabling streamlined IT management

Microsoft 365 has several admin centres each enabling IT management to control and govern a specific application. The Microsoft Teams admin centre is the relative youngster in the family having grown rapidly over recent years to provide IT management with a gateway to understand, administrate and apply governance to the hectic reality of teams’ usage. 

Improvements introduced at Ignite include:

• Function search and the app discovery tool that enables discovery of relevant apps using categorisation and enhanced app details
• Device analytics dashboard providing timeseries data and device utilisation metrics offering insights, tips, suggestions and pro-active alerts all with the ability to download reports for further analysis in your favourite application.
• For businesses where VIPs need to be supported differently from other users, priority account notifications and alerts to assist with support prioritisation. 

Collaboration across organisational boundaries

Possibly the most looked for and requested functionality over the last 18 months during the Coronavirus pandemic is the need to communicate effectively between organisations without the need for multiple accounts or other workarounds introducing security risks.  Ignite introduced two updates that are facilitated by the capabilities of Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Teams Connect:

• Shared Channels – Can be shared with individuals and teams across multiple organisations. This will be a game changer allowing shared channels to co-exist alongside your own teams’ channels. Users will be able to schedule meetings, use apps, with each shared channel able to support up to 50 teams and across as many organisations as needed.
  Admins are catered for with this enhancement with the ability to configure granular trust relationships – this will be available in preview early in 2022. 
• Personal Teams accounts – Windows 11 introduced the personal teams accounts that effectively replaces the need for Skype. These personal teams accounts will also be available for collaboration via an invitation by email or phone number whilst staying within the boundary of the host organisations security and compliance policies – this again will be available in preview early in 2022.

Rooms and devices enhancements

Many businesses have deployed Teams’ Rooms functionality with an ever-growing list of supported devices. New enhancements introduced at Ignite include:

• Direct guest join – already supported by Zoom and Cisco meetings, this is being extended to include BlueJeans and GoToMeeting.
• New device – Yealink deskVision AIO24 coming to teams’ rooms devices in early 2022.
• Surface Hub management – Teams admin centre will allow the management of Surface Hubs alongside other Teams room devices.

Mesh comes to teams

Together mode and Presenter view introduced immersive meeting experiences albeit in 2D. Mesh for Microsoft Teams takes the next step introducing 3D experiences. Mesh will enable new experiences where meeting attendees can be represented as personalised avatars – no cameras need to be enabled or turned on to enjoy this experience.

Organisations can now create an “immersive space” that reflects or represents an actual meeting room, conference space or even a simple coffee shop to help facilitate improved collaboration, connectivity, and team communication. These immersive spaces will allow users to be represented by their (currently floating) avatars. This feature brings mixed-reality headsets to a mainstream collaboration platform.

Immersive spaces will allow the use of existing documents, presentations, and other Microsoft 365 content in a spatial context.  Minority Report? Not quite yet.

New chat features

As Microsoft Teams continues to grow and evolve the chat functionality remains the most used feature. Ignite announced the following enhancements to Chat:

• Chat with self – Send yourself reminders or messages
• Chat density – customise the number of chat messages a user sees on screen:
  • Compact – 50% more messages appear on screen
  • Comfortable – keeps the chat density as it is today
• Chat reactions – more than 800 3d emojis will be available (currently only 6 are available)
• Chat message delivery delay – like email message delay – this will allow a message to be delivered at a chosen time.
• Search results filtering – users will be able to filter search results and toggle between tabs to find relevant information

Webinar enhancements – enabling more engaging external events

One thing that the coronavirus pandemic introduced to the technology world was virtual conferences and en-masse webinars. Microsoft teams leads the way in offering webinars to large audiences. Enhancement announcements include: 

• Virtual green room – this will provide organisers with a room – a space to facilitate social activities, offer Q&A features, chat monitoring, content sharing and audience settings all within a secure controlled area.
• Minimise webinar distractions with enhanced controls – attendees will only see shared content and presenters that are bought on screen.
• Co-organiser – another frequently requested feature – this will allow the ability for multiple organisers to be assigned up to a maximum of 10 that will have the same capabilities and permissions as the main organiser.

Microsoft Loop and Teams – a new way to collaborate?

Whilst not specifically Microsoft Teams related, the new Loop functionality is currently available only with Teams Chat for those users that use the developer preview features. Microsoft Loop brings a flexible canvas that will allow for real time portable collaboration components that will be available across many of Microsoft 365 apps. 

As mentioned above, this functionality is available in preview via Teams developer mode.

Microsoft Loop consists of three components:

• Loop components
• Loop pages
• Loop workspaces

These components are built on and improve the existing open-source fluid framework. These components are rolling out initially across Teams, Outlook, and OneNote over the next few months with more applications and Loop components due to be announced in 2022. 

Cielo Costa work across Microsoft technologies on innovative technology projects aimed at resolving everyday business challenges with solutions that fit within your ways of working. If any of the announcements at this year’s Ignite conference have piqued your interest then why not book one of our envisioning sessions and let’s see how we can use this technology to solve your everyday needs.