Microsoft Teams: What's new and coming soon

As the new academic year gets into full swing, Microsoft has begun rolling out a raft of new features, enhancements and ways of collaborating, communicating and working with Microsoft Teams.

Check our features lists below to find out more, and have a look at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap for a full list of what to expect into 2025.  

Teams meetings – the lowdown 

Did you know there are no fewer than eight ways to hold meetings or events using Teams?

If you don't know which type is best for your needs, our guide to the different Teams meeting types could help. You can also find useful guidance for setting up Teams meetings on the IT Help website.

Teams features available now

We’ve gone through Microsoft’s roadmap and discovered these things which we think you’ll find useful: 

• 

  Export Q & A questions – Useful for summarising questions and answers when set up for a Teams meeting.  

• Auto-hiding of inactive channels - Teams will automatically hide channels that aren’t widely used within your Teams.  
• Tighter integration with Outlook calendars - Meetings can now be accepted or declined directly from within Teams without needing to access your Outlook calendar.  

Teams features rolling out soon 

Other features that Microsoft plans to launch soon include: 

• Chats for organisers and presenters in Town Hall meetings - allowing for pre-meeting chats and conversations.
• Short meeting URLs - to simplify meeting links and strip out extraneous characters for a more user-friendly experience.
• Easier ways for meeting participants to move between breakout rooms in Teams meetings. 
• New meeting settings - to allow all participants to take part in collaborative annotations in meeting presentations.
• Video clips in channels – Coming soon! 
• Channel cards – Add a new informational card to your channels to give your users more insights into how to use them. 

External users  

Did you know that some of the most common support issues in Teams are in relation to external users and guests?  

Please remember:  

• External users can be joined to a Team just like any university user (using their primary email address).  
• Once joined, external users can use Teams in the same way as a university user (dependent on their own tenancy or organisation settings). We do not block or prevent users being joined to Teams from external organisations.  
• Once joined to a Team, external users can then be joined to a private channel.  
• External users cannot use shared channels, either as individuals or as part of a Team. This is the only channel type that externals cannot use - please do not try to use these with external collaborators.  

For more information on the ownership and management of teams and interaction with external users see the Teams Owners Guide.

Further information and help 

Lots of information about getting Teams help, advice and training is available on the IT Help, IT skills  and the Centre for Teaching and Learning websites.   

You can also find information and guidance about using Teams in the Nexus365 User Group which is open to Oxford University members (code is w2c7be7).