Microsoft Readying a Raft of New Features for Teams

Microsoft marked the one-year anniversary of its Teams enterprise chat hub by unveiling new features coming to the service this year, including Cortana integration and a new capability called "Direct Routing."

Originally positioned as Microsoft's answer to Slack, Teams first launched last March as a component of Office 365, which quickly exposed the new platform to the cloud productivity suite's broad base of 120 million users. Microsoft did not provide an update on Monday for how many users Teams has, but the company did report that 200,000 organizations are now using Teams. More recently, Microsoft disclosed that Teams will merge over time with Skype for Business.

After a rough start to 2018 within Microsoft and across the industry, Microsoft's digital voice assistant Cortana will get some attention from Teams engineers at Microsoft. Microsoft plans to add voice integrations within Teams that will allow users to speak with natural language to make a call, join a meeting or add other people to a meeting. The functionality is planned at first for IP phones and conference room devices.

In addition to Cortana integration, other features coming this year include background blur on video, inline message translation, proximity detection for Teams Meetings and mobile sharing in meetings.

The background blur will be an appealing feature for anyone calling into a meeting when they've got an unprofessional scene behind them or a background that they'd otherwise like to keep meeting participants from seeing. Blurring is one approach to the issue. Another approach, from Zoom Video Communications, is a Virtual Background for videoconferencing that allows users to select and display an image, such as a cityscape, behind them during a meeting.

Inline message translation presumably will leverage translation and transcription services in Azure to make posts readable to participants who speak different languages in chats and in channels, which is the Teams term for topic-based discussions among members of a team. With users in 181 Microsoft-defined markets around the world, the translation feature could get heavy use.

The proximity detection feature is designed to help users find and add a Skype Room System. A more universally useful feature will be mobile sharing, which will let attendees share live video streams, photos or their mobile screen.

Microsoft also disclosed a new enterprise calling feature to be available by the end of June called Direct Routing. While the specifics are complicated and have a lot of dependencies on both Microsoft products and third-party infrastructure, Direct Routing will be a way for customers to use existing telephony infrastructure with Teams for calling. In that sense, Direct Routing joins Microsoft Calling Plans as ways for customers to enable calling from Teams. More detail on Direct Routing is available here.

On the anniversary, Microsoft also highlighted some previously disclosed elements of the Teams roadmap. One is cloud recording, a one-click meeting recording option that will automatically transcribe and timecode a meeting. Features include the ability to read captions, search the conversation and play back the meeting. Later, Microsoft plans to add facial recognition to automate attribution of comments to specific attendees. Parts of the calling roadmap that Microsoft highlighted again on Monday included consultative transfer and call delegation.

Although they weren't reinforced on Monday, Microsoft has previously discussed a number of features coming by the end of June. For meetings, those features include broadcast meetings, federated meetings, large meeting support for about 250 participants, a lobby for PSTN callers, Outlook meeting schedules from other platforms, PowerPoint loading and sharing, whiteboard and meeting notes, user-level meeting policies for IT professionals, and e-discovery enhancements.

On the calling side, Microsoft has publicly talked about 2018 availability for call support between Teams and Skype Consumer, distinctive rings, call queues, "do not disturb" breakthrough, forwarding to group, call parking and group call pickup. (For more background on Teams-Skype integration, listen to the Redmond Tech Advisor webcast with Office 365 and SharePoint MVP Christian Buckley from December.)

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 12, 2018