Microsoft Teams is getting yet another update, just in the time for the new year. The tech giant announced a slew of updates and new features, some of which are available now while others will be rolled out in 2021.
“Teams is the hub for chat, collaboration, meetings, apps, and workflows, and the enhanced Calls app brings the most important calling elements—the dial pad, call history, voicemail, contacts, and settings—into a single location, making it easier to stay connected in the flow of your work,” the company shared in a blog post.
The new features give Teams admins the options to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location of their calls, which makes sharing these recordings and associated transcripts with external guests much easier.
Microsoft also hopes to make placing and receiving calls in the car easier than ever before with CarPlay support for Teams Calling. It will allow users to use their vehicle’s built-in controls to operate Teams as well as voice-activated devices such as Siri to make calls.
Spam calls are frustrating, and Microsoft didn’t forget about them when optimizing Teams for calls. Teams will be able to identify potential spam calls and will also attest to your legitimacy when you make outbound calls as well. This will also include an enhanced reverse number lookup.
Teams will make it easier to transfer calls between mobile and desktop and receive calls from different endpoints including the Teams app. Calling users can bring multiple different one-to-one calls together to combine conversations and simplify multiple conversations. Call merge is now available for both PSTN calls and VoIP calls.
Low-data mode will allow users to preserve data or make calls in locations with a poor or limited network connection. Starting in early 2021, users will be able to adjust their settings in Teams to cap the amount of data that will be used during video calls and establish different settings based on network availability.
Microsoft also indicated that it is adding improvements to workflows in Teams. One of those improvements is the ability to put team members into a specific channel with a "collaborative calling" capability, which will be rolled out in 2021.
