Hello, welcome to Collaboration Coach. My name's Matt
and this is the Roadmap Radar for September 21.
In this show I look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap for the coming month
and I pick out the things that I think you'll be interested in.
We've got updates and new features for Teams and SharePoint this month
but first let's take a look at a big update for Whiteboard.
So let's start with a big new refresh coming for an existing app
and that's Microsoft's Whiteboard.
I'm a big fan of Whiteboard.
I use it all the time for my customer meetings and videos
but it can be very unreliable in so many ways.
Just moving around the canvas,
zooming and placing objects could be laggy and awkward
and it would sometimes hang and even lose information.
So Whiteboard is sorely in need of some love
and back in June, Microsoft announced that it would be a complete refresh
and then as usual the waiting began.
This update has been delayed a couple of times
but I think it may finally arrive this month.
So what can we expect?
Well, there's a focus on "hybrid work"
meaning accessing the whiteboard from different locations and devices.
There'll be a new modern look and feel that will make it easier to use
and one that will hopefully be similar across all devices.
They're adding what they call a "creation gallery"
which is a menu of types of content you might want to add to your board,
like stickers, shapes, notes and so on.
There'll be a persistent top bar which is going to be added
to manage sharing with your collaborators,
and you'll see a roster there
so you can see who's viewing the canvas with you.
There's been some work done on the presence indicators too.
They are now named "cursors" and are hopefully more reliable.
They should show you who's working on what part of the board.
There will be more than 30 customisable templates that you can use
to populate your whiteboard with the things you need to get your meeting started.
There are already templates in the app
like kanban boards, project milestones and persona building,
and this new update will add lots of new ones.
Microsoft say there will be improved mouse inking - which was always tricky.
The improvements should make it easier to create smoother and cleaner lines
with a mouse or trackpad,
and performance improvements -
boards open faster, you can pan and zoom more effectively.
All this is promising and should be available at the end of September
and when it is, I'll post a video to walk you through it.
There are two new presenting options being added to Teams meetings.
You can now present with "side by side" and "reporter modes"
when you share your desktop or windows during a meeting.
"Side by side" lays your camera feed next to your content in another window
and "reporter mode" puts you in front of it.
You can choose the mode when you share your screen.
You'll see the presenter mode toolbar, and you can choose side by side or reporter.
You can also choose to customise the background
which will give you a list of very tasteful backgrounds for you to choose from.
Then you can choose to share either your screen - which is your whole desktop -
or an app from the windows list like PowerPoint.
What's cool is that when you share now,
you'll see a window showing you what the attendees are seeing
so if you need to go into full screen slideshow mode like I am here,
you can still monitor how awesome you look at the same time!
The side-by-side and reporter modes started rolling out to Teams desktop for Windows and Mac in August,
and is expected to complete by the end of September.
For Teams meeting recordings that are saved to OneDrive and SharePoint - which is the default now,
you'll be able to change the playback speed when you watch the video.
I often play back a long video slightly faster to save time.
In the video player you'll see the speed and you can change it to five different options.
The playback speed feature is rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of September.
There's a couple of new updates for the breakout room feature in Teams meetings.
First we'll be able to create the rooms before the meeting starts and add participants to them.
Currently we must do that once the meeting has started.
We'll also be able to bulk create and delete the rooms,
configure the options for each room - like the timer -
and add any participants to each room manually.
This allows us to prepare our breakout room sessions in advance
so we don't have to do it at the last minute.
The second update is the addition of breakout room managers.
A breakout room manager is a presenter that has control over a breakout room.
The organiser can assign a presenter as the manager of a single room
and they'll be able to do things like assign users to rooms,
open and close rooms, set a timer and send announcements.
Both of these updates for breakout rooms are rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of September.
You probably know that Teams channels map to SharePoint folders.
So when you create a channel in Teams, a folder is created in SharePoint too to store the files.
But currently when you rename a channel,
the corresponding folder in SharePoint is not renamed.
This is obviously confusing for everyone so Microsoft are fixing it at last.
When this new update is applied to your tenant,
when you rename a channel in Teams, the folder it's linked to in SharePoint will also be renamed.
So the folder rename update is rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of October.
End-to-end encryption is the encryption of information
from where it's created to where it's sent.
This means that information can't be intercepted and decrypted by a bad guy in the middle.
Microsoft is bringing this type of encryption to Teams calls.
This will mean that you can make a call and it will be encrypted as it is sent over the internet.
This feature must be switched on by your administrator,
and when it is you'll see an end-to-end encryption option
in your Teams desktop settings in the privacy page.
You can switch it on and off as required.
And the end-to-end encryption feature will start to roll out at the end of September
and should be complete by early October.
SharePoint site owners can now add a template to their site.
Whether it's a brand new site or an existing one,
a template with fancy new content, pages and web parts can now be applied with a couple of clicks.
This will take a lot of the hassle out of getting your new site up and running
by quickly adding pre-populated content.
Each template has a theme like event planning, training and courses and project management.
You can choose your theme
and you'll get to see a preview and some description of what the template is useful for.
To apply a template, owners can go to the site settings wheel and choose "apply a site template".
When you apply the template,
all the new content and the changes to the look and feel of the site are applied
but none of your existing pages, lists and libraries are changed.
There are different sets of templates for Team sites and Communication sites.
The rollout of SharePoint site templates finished at the end of August
so it should be available for everyone now.
Okay, that's your lot. Thank you so much for watching this month's Roadmap Radar,
and I'll see you next time.