Microsoft Teams gets new features, updates at Ignite 2022

Microsoft has announced a host of new features for its Teams platform during its annual flagship event Ignite 2022. The company has added new features for Teams meetings, Teams chat, improved the channel experience, and more at the event which has been hosted in a hybrid format, in-person in Seattle, Washington, US and virtually.   

Teams is one of the most important Microsoft 365 apps for Microsoft, which has more than 270 million monthly active users globally and was a big focus during the annual conference. 

In his keynote presentation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the “new updates are aimed to improve hybrid work and help its enterprise users manage employees efficiently”. 

Starting with the Excel Live on Teams, the feature enables participants to live-edit the Excel file directly — right from the app. It means users can make edits without opening another window. Then, the platform is also improving Teams Live Share, which turns any app shared in a Teams Meeting into a “real-time, multi-user collaborative experience”. Nadella said that “the experience allows participants to interact and collaborate better”. 

“Teams is also improving hours and location tools to make it easier to schedule in-person meetings “by allowing people to specify where they will be working from and adjust on an hourly basis”. 

Microsoft has also introduced a new Microsoft Places — a Connected Workplace category to help new and existing employees know who will be in the office when and where people are sitting. It is mainly designed for managers to understand how people are using the office. It may help users optimise their real estate investments. 

Further, the tech major introduced Teams Premium, which includes an “Intelligent Recap”, which the company said will “act as a virtual assistant during meetings, even in the employee’s absence”. It creates tasks, automatically generates chapters from the meeting and shares personalised highlights from the recording. 

While the company is yet to share availability details, Teams Premium includes AI-powered live translations for captions, enabling meeting participants to view captions in any of 40 spoken languages, so everyone can join the discussion in the language of their choice. 

The Redmond giant also rolled out a host of cloud security features and services at the event. It introduced Defender for DevOps, aimed at security teams who want the ability to manage security during the development lifecycle to reduce vulnerabilities in the software and avoid cloud misconfigurations that can open enterprises to attacks. 

“Too often, cybersecurity and development teams within organisations operate entirely apart from each other,” Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s vice president of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy said. “With more bad actors exploiting vulnerabilities in the code itself, it's critically important to build security in from the beginning.” 

The company has also announced a major update for iPhone users with Windows 11 PC. Soon, iPhone users can sync iCloud photos with Photos desktop app on Windows 11. Later, Apple TV and Music will also come on Microsoft Store, it said.