In this post I like to highlight some new and planned Microsoft Teams features based on the latest roadmap updates by Microsoft. The last few days many updates were made to the Microsoft Teams roadmap. There are several neat feature updates for Microsoft Teams which will be rolled out soon, are rolling out now or which are already available. Let me give you an overview on these.

Meetings and live events

• end meetings | as an host you can now end meetings. So nobody can remain in the meeting to proceed or use the online meeting space.
• audioconferening dialin user number masking | PSTN participant phone numbers will be masked from external users [~May 2020]
• background effects in meetings | use background (pre-selected) images to enable other participants to focus on you and reduce distraction. later also custom background images.
• raise hands in Teams meetings | attendees can rais their virtual hand to notify the presenter that there is a person who would like to speak
• share system audio in a meeting
• share system audio in a live event

Voice / telephony

Microsoft 365 Business Voice | Microsoft 365 phone system capabilities are available for SMB organizations with up to 300 seats as addon license for the smaller licensing bundles (business plan/s).

So, also business plans are enabled to go for calling plans and/or Direct Routing to enable (pstn) telephony to/from Microsoft Teams.

Chat

Multi window chat | Ability to pop out a chat in a separate chat window

Security

Microsoft adds Azure AD Premium Plan 1 to M365 Business plans which provides feature like

• conditional access,
• self-service password reset and
• multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure your identities.
• Plus some more features like Cloud App Discovery (to discover used apps which you might were not aware that these are used within your company),
• application proxy,
• dynamic groups,
• passwordless auth (Windows Hello for Business, Microsoft Authenticator app, FIDO 2).

All this helps to make your communication and collaboration for your business more secure. Especially for SMBs (up to 300 seats). This is really compelling due to price and feature set. Until know you had to get enterprise plans for this to get the option to add these features to your Microsoft 365 deployment.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Microsoft now really pushes out these features and changes to enable small and medium sized business (SMBs) to securely communicate and collaborate at a reasonable price. To me, MFA (for all) was long awaited in this licensing segment because nowadays MFA should be the imperative anyway.

Additional resources

• Azure Active Directory Premium P1 is coming to Microsoft 365 Business
• Microsoft Teams PSTN telephony licensing update for SMBs
• Microsoft Teams – end meeting for all participants within a Teams meeting [Featured ID: 63286]
• Microsoft Teams – PSTN participant phone numbers are masked from external users [Featured ID: 63309]
• Microsoft Teams – Share system audio in a Teams meeting [Featured ID: 50692]
• Microsoft Teams – background effects in Teams meetings [Featured ID: 62890]
• Microsoft Teams – share system audio in live events [Featured ID: 63276]
• Microsoft Teams – raise hands in Teams meetings [Featured ID: 62755]
• Microsoft Teams – Multi-Window Chat [Featured ID: 57292]