What's new in Microsoft Teams: Chat Bubbles on iOS and Android, 'co-organizer' role and more
Microsoft in June 2022 rolled out a host of new features as it continues rapidly developing Teams, its collaboration platform for hybrid work with 270 million monthly active users.
Multitasking in Teams meetings on the iPad has improved. There's now a collapsible right panel during meetings that allows the participant, for example, to chat with colleagues while watching and listening to a presentation.
Chat bubbles in meetings are now available on iOS and Android. When chat bubbles are enabled, users can see chat messages on the screen to preview the two most recent messages. This avoids the need to manually open the chat window within a meeting to see what participants are typing. Users can temporarily or permanently turn off chat bubbles.
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Organizations with multi-language teams can now customize emailed meeting 'join' invites to include the languages that users are most comfortable with. Admins can apply a policy by enabling the MeetingInviteLanguages parameter in the CsTeamsMeetingPolicy in the admin portal. It can be set at at the user or group level, or for the entire organization.
There's a new "co-organizer" role, below the official organizer, which can be assigned to up to 10 meeting attendees. Co-organizers can manage Meeting Options, but they can't currently create and manage breakout rooms, manage meeting records, and view or download attendance reports. Co-organizers need to be from the same tenant as the organizer.
Teams for the web also gained better real-time translation capabilities last month as well as live captions and translations in 27 languages.
Microsoft this month added six more spoken languages for live captions and transcriptions in Teams Meetings, including Czech, Thai, Hebrew, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Turkish.
Teams on Android has gained a notification drawer located on the top of the screen to see in-meeting system messages. This can be collapsed and notifications cleared with a single press.
Live transcription is also now available for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) for Azure Virtual Desktop users.
For chat and collaboration, Microsoft has made it possible to embed Teams chat within Dynamics 365 for salespeople to ease the workflow between the two platforms. This allows linking of existing or new chats to Dynamics 365 records, like sales opportunities and service cases.
Microsoft is also improving e-signature approval capabilities on mobile while e-sign approvals are now fully embedded within Teams Approvals. Users can also view and edit Adobe Acrobat PDF files within Teams.