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Collaboration services and capabilities have always been important, but since the start of the pandemic, they have become critical for countless businesses. Microsoft continues to propose innovations in this area, starting with the new Teams Premium and passing through novelty in Microsoft 365 and in Edge.
Microsoft Teams Premium takes Teams to a new level
At Ignite 2022, Microsoft unveiled Teams Premiumnew (and yet another) version of its service for corporate communication in which numerous new features are made available, many of which made possible by artificial intelligence.
There will be meeting guides, which will provide users with meeting templates with pre-defined settings, so that they can better manage calls based on their type (for example, an internal meeting or a call with a customer). Settings can be defined by IT, giving users easily accessible options designed to meet the specific needs of the business. It will also be possible to customize calls with logos and backgrounds already in the “waiting room”, as well as set custom scenes in the “Together” mode.
Teams Premium will then offer a custom summary to each user, so as to allow them to find the most relevant information. The AI will automatically generate and assign tasks to the various users based on what was said during the meetings, and the recordings of the same will be automatically divided into chapters to allow better use. The mentions and moments in which the screen is shared will be reported in the same. Real-time subtitles can be translated into 40 languages simultaneously.
A will be introduced advanced information protection contained in meetings, for example via watermarks and restrictions on who can make recordings. Microsoft 365 E5 subscribers can leverage Microsoft Purview Information Protection labels to automatically protect meeting information.
We will then see the arrival of two new modalities: i advanced webinars they advanced virtual appointments. The former will add to the basic functionalities already available a waiting list for registration, manual approval of subscribers, automatic reminder emails, a “waiting room” for presenters and the ability to manage what is displayed by the public. The latter, on the other hand, are designed for communication with private users (i.e. B2C use cases) and will allow you to send SMS pre-appointment reminders, customize the waiting experience and post-appointment emails. It will also be possible to organize both scheduled and on-demand appointments. Organizations will be able to access a simplified view of virtual appointments to monitor waiting times and actual participation by users, with the ability to communicate with them via pre-appointment chat.
Microsoft Teams Premium will be available from December 2022 in previewwith general availability scheduled for February 2023. AI-related functionalities will be progressively available starting from the first half of 2023.
The other new features of Microsoft Teams
Teams Premium is certainly the most significant novelty presented at Ignite 2022, but it is not the only one. Microsoft has in fact introduced several updates to Teams that will also be available to other users of the service.
The first of these is Teams Phone Mobile, formerly known as Operator Connect Mobile: thanks to this feature, users can make calls directly from their company smartphone as they would with any calls, or from the “phone” application, but automatically switching to Internet calls and video calls using Teams in case it is required. The way this system works is managed by IT, which makes it easier to enforce corporate privacy policies. This functionality will not be available everywhere, as it requires the cooperation of telephone operators; in Europe it is planned to launch in Sweden with Telia, in Germany with Deutsche Telekom, in Switzerland with Swisscom and in the United Kingdom with BT. According to Microsoft, other operators will soon join the program, but we do not yet have information about Italy.
Staying on the more classic chat and collaboration features offered by Teams, it will now be possible send short video clips (with a very clear reference to the same function launched last year by Slack), leave reactions to messages with all over 800 emojis available, get automatically response suggestions through machine learning, schedule the sending of messages, delete chats, send notifications to all participants to a given chat using @everyoneand get tips on people to converse with based on their history.
Microsoft also states that it will improve the experience of using channels: it will be possible to fix messages, so as to find them more easily, as well as “pull out” a conversation in a channel to be able to follow it more easily, and an information panel will be introduced. On the canal. In other words, Microsoft appears to be bring back all the chat-related features that are present on Slack but they were still missing from Teams. In addition to this, it will be possible to customize the headers of the channels.
The latest news is in terms of functionality is that of “mesh avatar”: these are customized 3D animations that can be shown when a user does not intend to activate the webcam, so as to give a visual feedback to their interlocutors. It will be possible to make these avatars perform different actions and customize them to make them look like users. The feature is currently available in preview for a select group of users.
In addition, a collaboration with Cisco, so it will be possible to use Teams natively and by default on Cisco certified devices: initially there will be six, with three additional devices, but this number will grow. The first certified devices are the 55- and 75-inch Cisco Board Pro, the Cisco Room Bar and the Cisco Room Kit Pro, while the first peripheral will be the Cisco Desk Camera 4K. Certification is expected in early 2023.
Microsoft Teams users will then be able to access the data for free, starting in November Business Central directly from the Teams app, even if I don’t have a Dynamics 365 subscription.
In Dynamics 365 Customer Service instead it will be possible to automatically generate, thanks to the AI, a summary of the conversation between an agent and a customer; in this way, for example, it will be possible to transfer calls between agents, minimizing the work required to obtain essential information. Teams chat will then be integrated into Dynamics 365, so you can collaborate with others directly from this service and maintaining visibility on the necessary data.
Microsoft 365 news: dedicated app, Places, Syntex and Outlook
There are numerous updates to Microsoft 365. The first and most significant is the arrival of theMicrosoft 365 application, which will be available for web, Windows, and mobile devices. The new application, which will be accessible to both corporate and private users, will allow you to have a centralized starting point from which to access all the various functions of Microsoft 365, from creating new documents to accessing a list of shared documents. and related other users, up to a document tagging system to reach and categorize them regardless of their actual location.
Microsoft also unveiled two new applications, Places And Syntex. Places is dedicated to collaboration in hybrid work environments and provides a space in which putting together the physical and virtual environments. It does this through a series of tools, including a dashboard that shows the physical presence of collaborators in the office on the various days of the week, indicators that communicate where each is located, the possibility to book spaces (and view these reservations), suggestions on how to face the journey to and from the office, navigation inside the office, booking of conference rooms, indications for managers on employee perceptions of the hybrid work policies employed and on the use of physical spaces.
Syntex, on the other hand, leverages AI for indexing and cataloging unstructured data to make them easier to find and analyze, as well as to automate content-based workflows (Microsoft takes the example of automated contract processing). Syntex integrates with Microsoft Search and also allows you to manage data backup, archiving and analysis, and is integrated with applications from Microsoft 365 and beyond (for example, Dynamics 365). Containers are made available to developers that allow you to manage critical content with more options, for example with Content Lake that allows you to bring significant amounts of data to Azure Synapse in a simplified way.
There are also news for Outlook, which is updated to include features related to the new hybrid ways of working. In fact, when the update is released before the end of the year, it will be possible to indicate your working hours and the place from which you are working to allow colleagues to better manage their communication and meetings (this change also applies to Teams). Outlook will then offer meeting summaries through Teams and will allow you to send reactions to emails (a bit like instant messaging services) and schedule the sending of emails. Outlook Anywhere will offer additional suggestions via Context IQ when you include a mention like “@tizio”, with files and people linked to the one mentioned.
Microsoft Edge is enriched with collaboration features
Microsoft Edge Workspaces is the new feature (currently in preview) that allows you to share cards with a group of people. This feature allows you to directly access groups of shared tabs from the browser, rather than having to manually send a series of links; this function speeds up the sharing process and automatically updates shared cards, so that all members of a group are always aligned.
There are also news regarding the safetywith a feature dedicated to protecting against typing errors when typing a web address and a second that applies more restrictive settings when visiting sites not usually frequented.
To help people with disabilities, Microsoft also introduced the transcription in real time when playing content such as videos or podcasts, instant display of results when typing requests in the main bar (for example “weather in Milan”), and a better experience of using the Narrator function. We will also introduce a feature for change the colors on the pagesso as to improve its readability in case you have difficulties related to vision (for example, a form of color blindness).
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