Microsoft continues to enhance Microsoft Teams and recently announced some pretty big updates to Microsoft Teams this month. I will discuss the top five updates in this article so you can quickly go test them out to see how beneficial they will be to your organization.

Let’s begin my exploring the new capabilities in the Meetings feature of Microsoft Teams. Within the Recordings capabilities there are a few slick updates released and one of my favorites is the multi-speed playback which allows you to control the speed at which you play back the recorded meeting. This can be adjusted to slow down or speed up (0.5 to 2x). This is very helpful if you really want to focus on specific sections of the meeting, or cruise through other sections.

As a meeting owner you no longer have to manually start the recording, by configuring the meeting to automatically start recording, which is something we often forget to start. Deleting outdated recordings is essential and Microsoft has made that easier by allowing the admins to set a default number of days to retain the meeting recording and then tossing it into the recycle bin after the specified number of days has passed.

A Meeting Teams Rooms capacity setting is available to allow the admins to define the number of attendees per meeting. After it is set, cameras that support people-counting can be used to determine how many people are in the room and if it above the capacity setting it will display a banner at the top of the Teams Rooms screen indicating it is over capacity.

Within the Chat and Collaboration functionality you are now able to add alternative text or descriptions to images which can be helpful for individuals with disabilities who are using screen readers.

The last feature I want to share with you is the ability for admins to enable and control End-to-End encryption (E2EE) for one-to-one Teams calls.

Be sure to take the time to explore and configure these new capabilities now available in Microsoft Teams.