Polls, new interiors, and extraneous noise suppression – what’s new in Teams in November

Sharing knowledge is a wonderful tradition of SMART business! In today’s article, we’ll take a look at the most relevant and useful new features in Microsoft Teams. We hope this information will make your teamwork even more productive.

Meetings

No more noise at the meetings

Working from home, you might have felt annoyed with neighbors who enthusiastically set about renovating an apartment, or with a cat who suddenly decided to please everyone with its vocal abilities. Not only do all these noises distract from work tasks, but they also get in the way of online meetings. Colleagues and customers just can’t hear you!

Now, AI-powered technologies automatically remove unwanted background noise in real time. New Teams functionality analyzes your audio stream, filters out noise, and keeps the speech signal only. You can also control the intensity of noise reduction by adjusting the settings.

New interiors in Together mode functionality

On top of technical improvements, Microsoft cares about the psychological comfort of users. To set a fun and friendly tone for an online meeting, try the Together mode feature. Place your team on the screen as if they were sitting at the same table. This significantly boosts the morale of the meeting! Proven by the marketing department employees of SMART business.

Polls during meetings

You can liven up the meeting, or you can instantly solve a pressing issue with the help of a poll. Voting can be done before, during or after the meeting.

This will allow presenters to receive real-time feedback and turn listeners into active participants.

To enable the feature, just add Forms app as a tab to a Teams meeting.

To prepare a poll for a meeting, click:

Instant meetings from your mobile device

You’ll now find the familiar Meet Now icon on the calendar tab and in the Teams channels in your mobile phone. This will help you reach your team instantly! After you start your meeting, you can use any messaging app on your mobile device to share messages.

It is also possible to share the invitation with colleagues or directly add participants to the meeting.

Calls

Call Merge

While you’re on a call with a colleague or a group, you may need someone who was not initially invited. Now you can make a parallel call (in the meantime, the primary call is put on hold), as well as merge both calls.

Chats & Collaboration

Pinned Messages

Keep important information easily accessible. Select any message in a channel, click Pin, and it will appear in the channel information pane.

Additional features for polls and checklists in Teams

Your IT admin can add new features to existing Microsoft Teams capabilities by downloading them from GitHub.

Poll

Setting deadlines for voting and limiting those who can see the results of the poll.

Viewing poll results. In the summary, you can see which of the participants chose which answer and who did not take part in the vote at all. It is possible to download the file in .csv format.

Survey

The ability to create surveys with a series of questions in the chat or channel to get actionable insights. Convenient to use for registrations, testimonials, lead capture, reporting, complaints and evaluations. The functionality is ready for deployment as part of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

Checklists

Checklists will help your team have more control over how the task is progressing. Lists can be created in chat or channel.

The SMART business team will be glad if you find this knowledge useful!

Let’s share knowledge together!

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