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Hello it's Matt, and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This is the Office 365 Roadmap Radar for March 2021.
Once again we've waded through the roadmap so that you don't have to
and this month I've got 13 new features and changes to show you...
...so here we go
Let's get started with Microsoft Teams.
Teams meetings are getting a new dynamic view this month.
This is an update to how the current meeting stage looks.
With dynamic view,
video and audio participants are shown separately
with audio participants appearing as smaller circles on the stage.
Shared content will appear larger with more participants being visible.
We'll also be able to view Together Mode alongside shared content
and we can dock the participant gallery to the top of the screen rather than the bottom.
This feature's rolling out to the desktop versions of Teams this month.
Now more Teams view news.
The large gallery and Together Mode views are coming to Edge and Chrome,
so if you've joined a Teams meeting from either of those browsers,
you can choose to view up to 50 video participants in a single view.
You'll be able to choose the new view from the meeting toolbar.
This feature is rolling out from late March and should be complete by the end of April.
The number of participants that can join a meeting or a chat
is increasing from 300 to 1000.
These are interactive participants
- and "interactive" just means that they can share video audio and content.
This update is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of April.
Teams will also soon support a new type of participant known as a "view-only" participant.
View-only participants are people that can join the meeting and see the presenters and their content
but they can't share video, audio, or content, or take part in chat.
Today, if you join a meeting that has reached its capacity of 300 (or soon to be 1000),
you're not allowed to join,
but with this update, anyone joining after the capacity has been reached
will join as a view-only participant
so it's like an overflow for Teams meetings.
This is going to be rolled out in two phases.
First, between February and June this year, Teams will allow 20,000 view-only participants,
and second, from July it will actually revert to 10,000
and stay that way for the foreseeable future.
We'll soon have more control over who can bypass the Teams meeting lobby with this new feature
Meeting organisers can make sure that...
...only people that have been sent a calendar invitation by them...
...can automatically join the meeting and bypass the lobby.
The new meeting option will be added to the "who can bypass the lobby" drop down...
in the meeting options page.
The meeting organiser will be able to choose "people I invite",
and those people can join the meeting without going through the lobby...
and everyone else will be sent to the lobby.
This feature is rolling out from the end of March and should be complete by the end of April.
You may have seen the new Insights app that's been added to Teams.
This is part of the Microsoft Viva launch that will bring all the My Analytics features into Teams.
The goal of the new Insights app is to help you balance your productivity and well-being.
The insights app in Teams will introduce a new home page
and provide suggestions and access to a whole host of new well-being focused features.
Not all of those features are available straight away
but the app is rolling out now and will be complete by the end of April,
and then it will be updated with the new features over the next couple of months.
Now we have a few updates for SharePoint.
In Microsoft Lists, the "person" column is being updated to make it easier to use
so we'll see a picture of the person we're choosing when we update the column, now.
This update is rolling out now.
The events web part on SharePoint pages and news posts
will have an option to show images
because right now they're just plain text.
When this feature is enabled, each event shown in the web part page
will display the image used in the title area of the events page,
making them look that much better.
This will start to roll out this month and should be complete in June.
The immersive reader which is currently built into most Microsoft apps already...
will soon be available for SharePoint pages and news posts.
The immersive reader improves reading and writing
by narrating and highlighting the text of a page.
This feature will be available on all modern pages and news posts, except for home pages.
The rollout begins this month and ends in June.
On to Planner.
Microsoft are finally adding more labels to tasks
so we'll be able to configure up to 25 different colored labels
and use them to categorize our tasks.
The extra labels should be available for you now.
And we have a sharing update for Forms.
It's going to be easier to share your form with collaborators.
The share button on our forms will be replaced with a send button
and we can use that to share our forms with our potential responders.
There will also be a new co-author button or collaborator button
and that can be used to allow other people to edit the form with us.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete at the end of March.
And finally, we have text predictions coming to Microsoft Word for Windows.
This new feature will try to predict the next word you're going to type and suggest it for you.
This will reduce spelling and grammar errors
and will learn your writing style over time
to give you the best recommendations.
When this feature is available we'll see a text prediction when we're writing
and we can choose it by pressing tab or we can just ignore them.
Initially this feature is only going to be available for users of Word for Windows,
and writing in English.
And this is rolling out to Office installations now.
So there's my pick of the best of the road map coming to you in March.
Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end
and I'll see you next time.
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