News in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft announced a new feature in Teams – “Inline message translation is a new Microsoft Teams feature. This feature allows your users who receive a message (from another Teams user) in a different language from their own, to click the translate button to see that message translated to their client’s language. We’ll be gradually rolling this out to all customers in mid-July, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of July.” As I am big fan of MS Teams, I think that it should be good to put this into the bigger concept of other features coming out later this year.

This was the last announcement from the Microsoft via tenant news channel. This is generally a perfect thing as if you can imagine, there is more happening in the background. Microsoft tries to push hard to make Teams universal communication platform, so there are no surprises, that it should contain much more features which are on the roadmap right now.

• Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.
  
• Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.
  
• Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.
  
• Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.
  
• Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.
  
• Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.
  
• Microsoft collaboration devices—Microsoft Surface Hub is a powerful all-in-one large-screen team collaboration device. Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on Surface Hub, enhancing the capabilities of Teams in huddle spaces and meeting rooms equipped with Surface Hub.
  
• Meeting room systems—Lenovo and HP join existing partners Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom to transform the conference room experience with rich audio, HD video, center-of-room control, and one-touch join. All Skype Room Systems will support Teams meetings.
  
• Connections to existing equipment—Teams will certify new solutions from BlueJeans, Pexip, and Polycom to support interoperability for meetings in Teams with existing hardware investments.
  

  
  

• Desk and conference phones—New desk phones from AudioCodes and Yealink—and new conference room phones from Crestron, Polycom, and Yealink—run a native Teams application for consistent and streamlined calling experiences.
  
• Mobile phone stations—New mobile phone stations from Plantronics combine the Teams experience with desk phone capabilities for the mobile user.
  

And much more

For me personally one of the biggest adventure will be scenario, how Microsoft want to solve on-premise problem for corporates. The main thing is that people from Microsoft are just not able to sell products. I don’t know why, but it is as it is. Sometimes this is sad as normally it would be possible to have already teams in place in a big corporate. Instead of that there are hybrid scenarios a lot, which is also good for sure.

To be honest I am still using Slack for my team at work, however I am using Teams in other activities on daily bases and the main feature for me are microservices. I just love them. The way, how you should integrate almost everything is just wonderful. Just try it. Create new team, accessible even for the external users, create a few cards with PowerBI dashboards and other stuff (from SharePoint for example)… Just wonderful.