Teams - more than messaging

Welcome to our Autumn roundup of new Teams features, and some useful tips and tricks to help you get the most out of setting up meetings and collaborating with colleagues.  

Using webinars for your Teams meeting

Webinars are a good way of setting up meetings (small or large) where the focus is on delivery of content rather than interaction. They are also ideal for creating a meeting link that can be shared via a secondary or role-based account. Once you’ve set up a webinar, you can use the registration page and ‘join’ links and codes in an email from a secondary account in a few easy steps. Here’s how:  

1. Click on the calendar in Teams and click on the small dropdown arrow next to the 'New Meeting' button, selecting the 'Webinar' option.  
2. 

   Give your webinar a title, choose a start and end date and time, fill in a description and add in any invitees that will act as co-organisers, or presenters. Invite meeting attendees by clicking 'Save and send invites'. 

3. You can then continue setting up any other aspects of the meeting that are required. Do you need to add a theme or colour scheme to the event experience? Do you need a registration page for attendees? You can preview your webinar using the 'View draft' button if you wish.
4. When you are happy with your content, 'Publish' your webinar site and copy the link to the event when it appears.

The link can be used in emails and communications - the organiser will still be you, but you can send the registration and attendance information from any account.

Browse Top tips for webinars in Teams for more information.

Teams features now available

As always, we’ve gone through the roadmap for you and discovered these things which we think you’ll find useful: 

• ‘My Content’ in office.com now shows your Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive content in one place. 
• Channel meeting invitations – Feature allows channel meeting organisers to share invites on personal calendars of all channel members. 
• 

  Front Row gallery improvements for Teams Rooms on Windows - Uses Microsoft AI to remove individual backgrounds, adjust video participant size, and apply a unified background design so remote participants appear as if they are in the same room.

• Notification improvements for the Shifts app - notifications sent to impacted team members only, schedule owners to have more control of who receives the notifications, improved information for end user, and consistent notifications across all platforms.
• Intelligent camera support - IntelliFrame enables multi-stream video, face recognition of in-room participants, active speaker recognition, attributed voice-based transcription, and panoramic cameras.  IntelliFrame is available only with the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro license.
• Asana app - this tasks/agile/project management app is now available through Teams apps. More details are on the Asana website.

Coming soon

Keep an eye out as the below items become available for use over the next few months - they could be handy for you!

• New Microsoft Teams App for Mac and Windows users
• ‘Suggested files’ in chats and channels when attaching documents or files
• Mixed grid view in meetings – Only available with the new app experience  
• Meeting ID and Join Code for meetings using Teams Rooms on Windows  
• Improved search experience in chats and channels 
• Ability for ‘anonymous’ meeting attendees to rename themselves   
• New channels experience, simplifying the user interface for channel messages and recent posts  
• Inline playback of videos in chats and channels using Microsoft Stream (On SharePoint)
• Attach cloud files in chats and channels from Teams Mobile 
• Unique 'Join Meeting' links for external presenters allowing them to effortlessly join webinars as a presenter role  

The Teams roadmap is the best place to keep up to date with developments and find out more about what’s coming next, take a look.  

Teams training, help and advice

Lots of information about how to get Teams help, advice and training is available on the IT Help website, IT Learning Centre and the Centre for Teaching and Learning websites. 

Any member of Oxford University can join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) to stay up to date with Teams news, tips, tricks, quick-start guides and more - the joining code is LNJVOFR.  

Did you know?

New animated backgrounds are now available for Teams Meetings. Spice up your meetings with a bit of sparkle and pizzazz! Seasonal backgrounds are coming soon!

Here's how to set your background in motion.