What’s New in Teams 2020

As you might know, Microsoft is making a great effort of adding regular improvements to their products. Here is a list of the new features being added to Teams that were announced in April.

Users can select a custom background for video meetings in Teams

• Already launched, currently available
• Read this post for details: Changing your background in Teams meetings

Raise hand in meetings

The new ‘raise hand ‘ feature in Teams allows meeting attendees to identify that they wish to speak by toggling the hand icon in the meeting control bar, making it easier to actively participate in meetings.

When a meeting participant has raised their hand, an icon will appear next to their name in the roster view as well as their profile picture or video on the main meeting stage. Both the attendee who raised their hand and any presenter can lower individual hands in the meeting.

Raise hands will be available for both PC, Mac, and web-based clients to start, with mobile applications quickly following. Microsoft says they will continue to iterate and enhance this new feature in the coming weeks.

• Rolling out mid-April
• Roadmap ID 62755

Increase in the number of simultaneous videos in Teams meetings

Microsoft is increasing the number of participants who can be viewed simultaneously on the Teams meeting stage from 4 to 9.

This new experience optimizes for attendees who have enabled video and places the remaining audio-only participants below the meeting stage.

To provide a high audio and video quality experience, the layout logic will consider user bandwidth and alter the number of videos shown to provide the best meeting experience.

• Microsoft will be gradually rolling this out to customers near the end of April and expect the rollout to be completed in early May.
• Roadmap ID 63341

Update default policy to enforce lobby in meetings

Helps prevent and control unwanted users from joining meetings

• Rolling out mid-April
• Roadmap ID 63388

Assign a policy package to a batch of Teams users

The ability to assign batch policy packages will allow Teams admins to use cmdlets to more easily assign policies to entire groups of users at once.

• Rolling out mid-April
• Roadmap ID 63390

Control profile picture settings in Teams

Teams desktop and web experiences will honor the ‘Outlook on the Web’ mailbox policy setting that can control whether users are able to change their profile picture.

• Rolling out mid-April
• Roadmap ID 63389

Set a default policy for ‘Who can present’ in Teams meetings

Enabling tenant admins to update their Teams meeting policies to allow for a new default selection when choosing who can present in new Teams meetings (everyone, people in my organization, specific people, or only me).

Currently, the default selection is ‘everyone’ unless the meeting organizer selects otherwise through the ‘meetings option’ configuration.

To start, organizations can set this policy via a PowerShell cmdlet, and soon after Microsoft will have this policy configurable in the Admin portal.

• Rolling out early May
• Roadmap ID 63206

Updated ‘meeting join’ experience

• Microsoft currently allows anyone within an organization to start a Teams meeting. Moving forward, they will restrict the ability to start a meeting to only those users who have been assigned a policy to create a meeting.
  Meeting attendees without the ability to create a meeting will see a pre-join screen indicating that the meeting hasn’t started. These individuals will be automatically admitted into the meeting only after a user with permissions joins and starts the meeting.
• Rolling out end of April
• Roadmap ID 63355

Providing privacy for participants who call in to a meeting via PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network)

For customers with Audio Conferencing enabled for their Teams meetings, Microsoft will mask the PSTN participant’s phone number to users who have joined from outside of your organization.

• They expect this feature to begin to roll out beginning of May for PC, Mac, web, and mobile clients.
• Roadmap ID 63309