What’s New in Microsoft Teams | Nov 2020

There are several new features are released in Teams. Here some of the list of features which we can benefit from.

What’s New: Meetings

AI-based noise suppression
Our real-time AI noise suppression feature automatically removes unwelcome background noise during your meetings. The AI-based noise suppression analyzes your audio feed filtering out the noise and retaining only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise. 

New Together mode scene selection
Together mode re imagines meeting experiences to help participants feel closer together even when you are apart. We are excited to introduce new Together mode scene selections to transport your team to a variety of settings. Choose a scene to set the tone and create a unique experience for your meeting, whether it be a smaller conference room meeting, or an all-hands meeting held in an outdoor amphitheater.

Polls in Teams Meetings
Polls in Teams meetings is a seamless experience powered by Forms that helps you conduct more engaging and productive meetings. As a meeting organizer or presenter, you can prepare, launch, and evaluate polls before, during, and after meetings, respectively. Your attendees can easily view and respond to the polls in the pop-up bubble or chat pane. To enable this feature as the meeting organizer or presenter, simply add the Forms app as a tab in your Teams meeting

Full screen support in new meetings experience
We heard you, full screen mode is back! With full screen mode on Windows the meeting window fills up the whole screen, removing all other screen elements, including the title bar on the top and task bar on the bottom. On Mac OS, full screen mode maximizes the meeting window and the title bar is hidden. This helps you to reduce distractions and focus your attention.

Start an instant meeting from your mobile device
You’ll now find the familiar Meet Now icon on the calendar tab and in the Teams channel helping you connect with your team instantly. Once you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share the invite or add participants directly to the meeting, and anyone in the Teams channel can join without an invite.

Updated layout for meetings on iOS 

We have improved the Teams experience on iOS devices with a new presentation mode, the ability to see more participants, and the ability to see shared content and a spotlighted participant concurrently.

What’s new: Calling
Call Merge
While you’re on a call with another person (or a group), you might want to add another expert to participate in the call. Similarly, you may receive an incoming call that makes sense to connect with one you’re already on. Call Merge gives end users the capability to merge their Teams VoIP and PSTN active 1-1 calls into another 1-1 call or another group call. You can merge your calls, simply by choosing the “…” (more actions) button from the call controls and select “merge calls”. Learn more.

Survivable Branch Appliance
To support the most critical conversations in the event of an outage, the new Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to place and receive PSTN calls even in the event of a WAN outage. This SBA is now available to certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) vendors, allowing SBCs to link with the Teams client in the event the client cannot reach the Microsoft Calling network.

Ericsson Session Border Controller certification
Ericsson has completed the Session Border Controller (SBC) certification process, which ensures that their SBC supports Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams, joining the list of certified SBCs. This rigorous certification process [insert link here] includes intense 3rd party testing and validation in production and pre-production Direct Routing environments. Direct Routing permits customers to connect their own carriers and infrastructure with Phone System to enable Teams Calling. Learn more.

 

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