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Hello everyone. It's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This is the Office 365 Roadmap Radar for December 2020.
Once again we've waded through the roadmap so you don't have to
and this month we've got 10 new features and changes to show you.
So here we go.
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First of all we have some updates for Teams.
Polling is finally coming to Teams meetings.
You'll be able to create polls inside of your meeting
and then poll your attendees to get their feedback.
This feature will integrate Teams with Microsoft Forms.
A presenter can add the Forms app as a tab to the meeting before it starts,
then they can create the polls in draft ahead of time,
and then during the meeting they can launch them for everyone to see and respond to.
All attendees will be able to see the results in real time
and they can respond to them after the meeting is finished if the polls have not been closed.
This will be available on Teams desktop for Windows and Mac
and also for Teams on the Web.
This feature is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by the end of December.
Microsoft is increasing the number of members that can be added to a team...
...from 10 000 to 25 000.
Once the feature is available, all new and existing teams will be able to grow to up to 25 000 members.
This update is rolling out in December and should be complete by the end of January 2021.
Right now, Teams meetings are limited to 300 users.
Microsoft has an add-on for Teams called the "advanced communications add-on",
and soon this will support up to 20,000 meeting attendees, but there is a catch.
The majority of these attendees will be view only,
so once your meeting passes the 300 attendee mark, all new attendees will be view only.
View only just means that they can't participate as normal attendees,
but they can view whatever content or discussion is being shared in the meeting.
Also, the advanced communication add-on is not included in your Microsoft 365 plan.
You'd have to pay extra for it.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of this month.
Microsoft is launching a public preview programme
that allows people to have early access to unreleased features on the Teams app.
This will allow people to turn on preview features so they can evaluate and test them.
Administrators can turn on the new features with an update policy
and users can turn on the feature from their Teams client.
This is available now.
Teams will soon start to warn participants that there are five minutes left of the scheduled meeting.
This is just for information
and the notification will appear at the top of the meeting window for 10 seconds...
...and then disappear without you having to do anything.
It's just for information and it won't actually stop the meeting.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of this month.
Today when you record a meeting, the meeting is stored in Stream
which is the Microsoft 365 video service.
Microsoft are changing how recordings work
and in the future they'll be saved to either OneDrive or SharePoint.
This is a long term change that will start now and carry on through to July next year.
To start with, it will be opt-in only
so administrators will have to make a change that switches from Stream to OneDrive and SharePoint.
Today this can be done by administrators using script.
If no action is taken then the recordings are still saved to Stream
but in January all new meetings will be saved to either OneDrive or SharePoint by default
unless the administrator opts out.
By March next year, all customers will switch to OneDrive and SharePoint,
and this will just happen naturally if you take no action at all.
So why are they doing this?
Well, this is because sharing is so much easier when the video is saved to OneDrive or SharePoint.
You can control it like a normal file and share it in the same way
and you're not restricted by any of the limitations of Stream.
Microsoft is updating the browser version of Teams and giving it a new look and feel based on its fluent design system.
Fluent is something Microsoft have been working on for a while now
and they are slowly updating all the apps and services to adopt this new look and feel.
Fluent on Teams on the Web is going to include things like...
new icons, drop shadows between panels, rounded corners and colour adjustments.
This is available as a public preview now but will be standard release in January.
Now on to SharePoint.
So first, Microsoft are going to change the way that the SharePoint app works in Teams.
Today you can use the SharePoint app
to pin pages and lists as tabs to your Teams channels.
It's useful so people can get access to information inside of Teams
and not have to open up a browser and go off to SharePoint.
The new version of the app is also going to allow you to pin document libraries as well
so you can pin a library to your channel and then work on the documents inside of Teams.
There is also going to be a recommended section
that will suggest content to add based on how popular it is.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete in January.
There will be some changes to the branding options that you have for your header
in modern SharePoint sites.
Site owners will be able to control the size and layout of the header now.
They can go to the "change the look" settings and configure what the header looks like.
We'll be able to choose from the minimal setting,
also compact, standard and extended.
After this update is rolled out, all new sites will have the compact header as default
rather than the standard.
We'll also be able to add a background image and change the logo alignment
and we'll be able to turn the site title on and off as well.
This update is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by the end of January.
Soon you'll be able to add a "My Feed" webpart to your SharePoint pages.
The My Feed web part is something you can add to any page
that presents you with a useful mix of content that's personalized for you.
For example, if you're invited to a meeting or someone updates a document you're working on,
it will be added to the My Feed webpart.
The My Feed webpart will show as a new option in the webpart toolbox when you edit a page.
This feature is rolling out now and will be complete by the end of December.
So there's my pick of the best of the roadmap coming to you in December.
Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end and I'll see you next time.
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