- Coming up, with the recent one year anniversary
of Microsoft Teams, we're gonna take a look
at the latest updates, including its evolution
from a persistent chat based work space,
to an integrated hub for teamwork
with complete meeting and calling capabilities built in.
As well as new ways to bring
your favorite apps into Teams and more.
Also, if you're an IT admin,
we're gonna give you a first look
at the unified experience to manage Microsoft Teams,
along with Skype for Business going forward.
(techno music)
We're here once again by Anne Michels, from the Teams team.
Welcome, and congrats on the one-year milestone.
- Thank you, it's so good to be back on the show.
- So, from it's humble origins
of a chat based work environment,
it's now even more of an integrated hub for teamwork.
In fact, we just announced
that more than 200,000 organizations
are using Teams globally.
- We've really been focused
on delivering Microsoft Teams as the hub for teamwork,
that enables you and your teams to be more productive.
By giving you a single and secure location
that brings together everything you need as a team.
For example, chat, that's our core experience in Teams.
Meetings, you can schedule and join meetings.
Calls, Microsoft Teams is now your primary
enterprise calling client.
You can also share and collaborate on files,
and you can bring in your favorite tools into Teams.
We've especially been working on a few areas.
First, how can we broaden your collaboration experience?
Second, the extensibility of the platform,
so that you can bring in your apps in more ways.
And, we've also been working on improving
the overall meeting and calling experience,
and are bringing all the Skype for Business
online capabilities into Teams.
- So Microsoft Teams has really come a long way.
In fact, it's something I personally use every day.
But, before we go to deep into the updates,
let's catch everyone up on the core aspects
and core functionality of Microsoft Teams.
- Sure, so Teams is built around chat.
I'm here, in a team, and Teams are organized
by channels, which you can think of as topics,
or areas that you work on within a team.
Within a channel, you can chat,
and all chat messages are threaded and persistent.
So you have a full record of the conversation over time.
- This is really important because then you
can invite somebody late to a team,
or maybe you can a join a team late,
and then get up to speed with all the conversations
that have already happened.
- We also integrate fun and engaging ways to communicate,
like emojis, or gifs, or stickers
that you might use in your everyday social interactions.
When you share a file in a channel,
then that file gets uploaded automatically to SharePoint,
and you can see all your files
directly here at the top at the files tab.
But you cannot only view a file in Teams,
but you can also edit the file directly
here from the experience.
And back in my conversations tab,
if I click on the camera icon,
I can start an ad hoc meeting
directly here from the channel.
And when I go to the meetings tab,
I can see all of our meetings in one view,
including the ones set up in Outlook,
and I can also schedule a new one if I want to.
- So some of the things that we're hearing
is a lot of people can spend their entire workday
within Teams, they've got all their files, their apps,
the communications they need to make
with other team members all in one place.
But, why don't we dive into the updates.
- So let me first show you how we are broadening
your collaboration experience.
Many of you work with people outside of your organization,
like agencies, or partners.
And to enable you to collaborate with these people,
we have added guest access on Teams.
You can see here, I am in a chat in a channel,
that actually has several external members.
So for example, here at the top,
I can see that this team has guests,
and also every external member
is clearly labeled as a guest.
And if you want to add another guest,
you can do that by clicking on add member,
just as you would add an internal coworker.
All the guest needs is an email address.
- Okay, so if you hop on over to my machine,
I've received your invite,
I'm going to go ahead and click on the accept button.
And here you can see it's logging me in to Teams,
the nice thing is I can be signed in
not only with my own organization,
but also the second organization as a guest,
in this case, with only access to the
team that you've invited me to.
- Exactly, well, welcome to my team here, Jeremy.
- Thank you.
- Just one thing to notice for you, is your guest access
is scoped just to my team, and the other teams
that you might have been invited to.
While in fact, Jeremy is obviously very eager
to be part of the team and to get engaged,
so he's already sending me a chat message here.
And the nice thing that we have added,
is that I can now respond to the chat message
directly from the toast notification.
- Right and one of the things we can also do as an IT admin,
is we can control the actual guest experience.
And you can learn more about
all the controls you have available to you
at the link shown.
Now you mentioned earlier that we've built Teams
really as a means to be a platform that you can customize
with extensibility and integrative experiences
across other SaaS services that you use within Teams.
So what can we do there?
- There are different ways how you can use apps in Teams.
Most people will know that you can integrate an app as a tab
by clicking on the plus sign, I can add an app
like SurveyMonkey or Power BI dashboard.
And then it is easily accessible for everybody
at the top of the channel.
We also have bots in teams,
so you can at mention a bot like Growbot,
which gives kudos to your coworkers.
So this is just a really nice way to show appreciation
to the people that you're working with.
To make it easier for you to discover the apps
that are available in Teams, we've added a new store.
In here, I can search for apps by name or also by category.
Like, for example, analytics and BI,
or project management,
or integration type like bots, connectors.
Or I could also add a tab directly from here.
But sometimes,
you don't want to see all the information from an app.
So we've included in your personalized view of the app
where you can see only the information
that is relevant for you.
For example, here I can see all the Planner tasks
that have been assigned to me across my various teams.
- And this is great.
Since Teams is really a chat based experience,
are we doing anything that will actually connect
to some of these apps right from within chat?
- So let me show you some of the new ways
how you can interact with an app in Teams.
You can now include information from an app
directly in a conversation,
just like you would add an emoji or a gif.
So you can bring information in from an app,
like for example an item from Visual Studio,
with a simple click directly into chat
or a channel conversation.
So you don't have to include a screen shot or hyperlink
to that information anymore.
But, what if I now want to add somebody here to my chat
who is an actual expert on drones?
So another way how to interact with apps
is the new command box.
For example, here I can type slash who,
who knows about drones,
and then who searches the team conversation history
and the archive for people that are talking about drones.
- [Jeremy] Right, and if we flip back over to my machine,
one of the things we can do here is also navigate
or do other commands within Teams.
Here, I'm going to click slash call,
and you can see I can call Alex for example.
Or as I said, you can navigate as well,
so I'm gonna type slash go to,
and that will allow me to go to any of the channels
then in this case that I am a member of.
- Yes, it's a very powerful shortcut tool
to navigate Teams and to take quick actions.
And back here now on my machine,
I can see the results that who has returned.
So I have a list of people that talk about drones,
and Lee is actually a person that I know.
So let me go and jump back to my chat conversation
and now I'll go ahead and add Lee to that conversation.
And the nice thing that we have added
is I cannot just share the conversation history with Lee,
but I can also decide how much I want to share.
- [Jeremy] Looks like in this case,
you're going to share all of the conversation history.
- [Anne] Exactly.
And a few more thing that we have added in chat
is that you can now mute a chat if you do not want
to receive notifications anymore.
You can hide a chat, or you can even leave a chat
if it's not important to you anymore.
- Right and the big news in September is that we announced
Microsoft Teams will be the core communications client
for Office 365.
So what have you done there
to really enhance the communication capabilities?
- We did.
We've now started to bring all of the Skype for Business
online capabilities into Teams,
to give you a complete meeting and calling solution.
So I have a meeting here.
Let me just go ahead and jump into the meeting.
And when I join, I get to choose whether to join
with video or audio and I can also select my devices.
So I don't have to worry about joining
with background noise anymore.
I just joined here from the desktop app,
but when you invite somebody to a meeting,
they can also use their mobile phone if they're on the go,
or they can join directly from the browser.
They don't even need to have Teams.
You can invite anybody with an email address
to your meetings.
- So one of the really nice things here
is that you don't need anything installed on your machine
in order to join that online meeting.
No desktop apps, no browser plug-ins,
but to switch gears here, often I'm inside of a meeting,
I want to be able to share content out.
How can I do that from within Teams?
- That's an area we've especially been focused on.
To make sure that your meeting experience in Teams
is better than the typical remote meeting experience,
where you can lose a lot of time connecting to a meeting,
and extending your display and sharing your desktop,
that can take way too long to get set up.
With Teams, we are focused on streamlining this experience.
So I'm here, now in a meeting,
and it is very easy for me to control
what content I want to share.
And that could be a file,
or it could also be my entire desktop.
I see Jeremy you're actually here in the meeting with me.
Why don't you go ahead and try to share content
from your phone?
- [Jeremy] Okay, so let's try this out.
I'm gonna go ahead and click on the elipses here
and hopefully you'll be able to see this in your screen.
There it is.
Okay so first thing I'm gonna share my mobile screen
so that you can see what's on there.
And I've got some pictures I've been working on
with the Surface team.
I'm just gonna scroll through a few of those,
and you can see that.
But the nice thing is
because I'm connected to the cloud with my phone,
I can even go to all the office experiences here like Excel.
And now I've got the Excel app,
and you can see all the different Mechanics videos
that we're working on, and it's right there.
So that means I don't even have to have my laptop with me
in order for me to be able to share my screen with you,
or another device in order to share all the content I have.
It's all stored in the Cloud,
and it's all accessible right here from the phone.
So it really extends that screen-sharing experience
beyond the desktop, which is awesome if you're on the go.
But what if you're not able to join the meeting?
You're maybe late to it, or you're double booked.
Can I join that meeting afterwards?
- Yes you can.
I will give you an early look at cloud recording,
one of our key new features,
and the first step in our mission
to transform collaboration communication
through AI in teams.
So I'm here in a meeting, and I can start a recording simply
by clicking start recording.
And then when I'm done, I just leave the meeting.
This will be familiar to you if you have recorded meetings
in Skype in the past.
But with Teams, we've even gone a step further.
Because recordings are automatically saved
and uploaded to Microsoft Stream.
So you don't have to worry about where it's saved,
it's all taken care of for you.
So I actually have here a meeting that I recorded last week
and as it's all automatically transcribed,
I can also go ahead and turn on closed-captioning.
- [Jeremy] And this is really great
in terms of a use case for AI,
because it's adding the transcript there.
From an accessibility standpoint, it makes it much better,
and we're using things like cognitive services
or voice to text to really bring that transcript
and that caption file straight into the meeting
that's happened.
So switching gears again, why don't we talk about
some of the call integrations?
'Cause a lot of folks are maybe using their landlines
or PSTN lines, we've done some integration with Teams
to make all of that work as well, right?
- Yes.
So Teams is now also your primary enterprise calling client.
Teams has a full Cloud PBX client,
so you can call the people in your organization
or actually, you could call anybody else on the planet
who has a phone number.
So from the calling tab,
you can access all of your contacts.
I can see previews or missed calls,
and I can also access all of my voicemails,
including transcriptions.
It's all available for me in one place.
But while we all know
that calling is much more than just dial tone,
enterprises really need complex call flow support.
So we also support advanced call functions,
like call queues and call transferring.
For this functionality, you need a calling plan
which is available in many countries around the world.
And we are constantly increasing our global coverage.
So you can learn more about that at the link shown.
- So I know we have a lot of IT Admins that are watching
that administer things like Teams and Skype for Business,
and going back to your roots in terms of the Admin Center,
are there things that we've done here in terms
of bringing that unified experience together with Teams
and Skype for Business?
- Definitely.
We just rolled out the first version of the Microsoft Teams
and Skype for Business Admin Center.
This is a new unified portal which provides you
with the ability to manage Microsoft Teams
and Skype for Business in one place.
The portal has completely been redesigned
to make it easy to use, and it also provides you
with more functionality.
For example, in the new Admin Center, you can manage Teams
at the user level, or you can create messaging policies.
This is just the first version.
We will include additional workloads over time.
- Now this was a really great set of updates, Anne.
Thank you for joining us today.
It was really great to see the progress
on Microsoft Teams for users and admins,
but where can people go to get started?
- So it's really easy to get started with Teams.
Simply go to the link shown.
And if you're an admin and want to try the first version
of the Admin Center, please go to
admin.teams.microsoft.com
and log in with your Office 365 account.
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That's all the time we have for today's show.
Thank you for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(techno music)