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Hello, it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This is the Office 365 Roadmap Radar for November 2020.
Once again we've waded through the roadmap so you don't have to
and this month we've got 12 new features and changes to show you.
So here we go.
First of all, Teams.
There will be new scenes available for Together mode this month.
When you're in a Teams meeting and you switch to Together mode,
you'll see everyone sitting in a virtual meeting space.
These new scenes will be virtual rooms that you can choose from when you switch to Together mode.
They're rolling out during November and will be complete in December.
You will soon be able to appear offline in Microsoft Teams.
There'll be a new "appear offline" choice in the list of existing status.
This feature will show people that you're not available on Teams even though you're actually there.
We'll also be able to set a duration for our present status.
We'll be able to choose "duration" and then set a time for when the status is reset.
This will override other settings like calendar meetings or calls.
These features began rolling out in October and should be complete by the end of November.
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You'll now be able to control the Teams meeting options straight from the app.
When meetings have their own window in the desktop Teams app,
the organiser will be able to change meeting options within Teams
and won't have to open a browser.
We'll be able to do things like choose who can bypass the lobby when they join, and who can present.
This should be available now.
Audio conferencing allows attendees to join a Teams meeting by phone.
It's useful when there are people who can't or won't use the Microsoft Teams app, or they don't have any internet access.
Audio conferencing is a paid for add-on for Business and E3 enterprise customers.
Microsoft is running a promotion where you can sign up for audio conferencing for one year for free.
The offer is open until March 2021
and check out our video for more info on this feature.
With this new feature we'll be able to make Teams use either the Windows or Mac notification system
instead of the native Team system.
So rather than using the purple pop-up banner Teams uses,
we'll see the Mac OS or Windows notification pop-up to alert us to any new activity.
We'll be able to configure this in the Teams app settings on the notifications page.
This feature is rolling out throughout November.
Virtual breakout rooms for Microsoft Teams will allow us to start a meeting
and then split it into a number of smaller meetings.
Attendees will be able to move between the meetings and return to the main one whenever they need to.
When this feature is available,
we'll see a new breakout button on the Team's meeting toolbar
and we'll be able to configure the new rooms and move attendees between them.
Breakout rooms is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of November.
Those of us that use the Microsoft Teams desktop app will soon see a feature
that allows us to change the noise suppression.
Noise suppression means that Teams can actually reduce any distractions from background noise during a meeting.
You can change the noise suppression from the devices page in the Teams app settings.
Users can set the noise suppression level before a meeting
and once it's changed it applies to the next call.
There are four settings: auto, low, high and off.
Microsoft will start to roll this out this month and should finish in December.
This one is for those of you using Teams in the Safari browser on Mac OS.
If you join a Teams meeting in Safari now, you'll be able to share your desktop with the attendees.
This feature should be available now.
And now onto SharePoint.
In Microsoft Lists, and SharePoint we'll soon be able to add and delete comments on the list items.
When you open an item you'll see a comment button
and that will open up a comments pane on the right hand side of your browser.
Anyone with access to that item can make a comment and will be able to
switch between comments and activity on that particular item.
Comments will inherit permissions from the list they're in
so users with read-only permission to the list can only view the comments
and those with edit permissions will be able to make comments and delete them as well.
There'll be a few limitations to start with.
We won't be able to edit comments once they're made.
Classic lists will not support comments.
Lists in Teams won't support comments and comments are not indexed by search.
So this feature is rolling out now and should be complete in early December.
A friend of the show, SharePoint Spaces is out of preview and finally generally available.
This hopefully shows Microsoft's continued commitment to SharePoint
as a place for building mixed reality solutions in the future.
Not much changes other than the preview labels are removed from all the Spaces features.
You'll still have to turn on the feature at site level,
so check out our video on SharePoint spaces that describes how to do that.
And this change should land by the end of November.
The new site performance page helps site owners
discover and use page diagnostics to improve page health.
We'll soon be able to get to the new site performance page from the settings wheel of any modern SharePoint site.
The site performance page will help site owners understand
how their pages are performing and improve the viewing experience.
The site performance page is rolling out in November and will be complete in December.
Custom content types have always been a part of SharePoint but until now they haven't had a modern upgrade.
Modern content types are starting to roll out now and can be added to any list or library
that allows multiple content types.
You'll be able to add new columns and choose "content type" as the column type.
In the panel that appears you'll be able to select any content type for the list or library,
review the information and choose to add them.
This feature is rolling out from October and expected to be complete at the end of November.
So there's my pick of the best of the roadmap coming to you in November.
Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end
and I'll see you next time.
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