The feature, which was first announced two years ago and has been in preview ever since, lets users of the software giant's video conferencing software use their smartphone or tablet as a walkie talkie that can work over both a cellular or wireless connection.
While Teams' walkie talkie functionality will work on any Android smartphone by pressing and holding down an on-screen button when speaking and releasing the button to listen, it's even more useful on rugged smartphones. This is because many rugged smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy XCover 5 have a customizable button that can be mapped to Teams' walkie talkie feature so that workers won't have to unlock their phones to access push-to-talk functionality.
Teams users can now test out Microsoft's walkie talkie feature for themselves on their Android smartphones and tablets but the company has also gone ahead and brought this functionality to the Teams app for iOS.
(Image credit: Microsoft)
Dedicated push-to-talk button
In addition to highlighting how Teams' walkie talkie feature can be used on Samsung's rugged smartphones, Microsoft has also announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Zebra Technologies in a new blog post.
As a result, Teams' walkie talkie feature is now generally available on a wide range of Zebra mobile devices including its rugged TC-series, customer-facing EC-series and its scanning device the MC-series. However, what sets these devices apart from others is the fact that they have a dedicated push-to-talk button so that frontline workers can instantly and securely communicate with their teams with the push of a button.
In a separate blog post, corporate vice president of modern workplace verticals at Microsoft, Emma Williams explained how the company's digital walkie talkie feature is more secure than traditional radios, saying:
“This functionality, built natively into Teams, reduces the number of devices employees must carry, and lowers costs for IT. Unlike analog devices with unsecure networks, customers no longer have to worry about crosstalk or eavesdropping from outsiders. And since Walkie Talkie functions over Wi-Fi or cellular data, this capability can be used across geographic locations.”
Being plagued by annoying notifications pings whilst on a call may soon finally be at an end for users of Microsoft Teams.
The company has confirmed that it will soon allow users to mute notifications whilst they are in a video conferencing meeting or don't want to be disturbed.
This should mean an end to distracting notifications or alerts when you’re in the middle of an important meeting, particularly as more and more businesses embrace hybrid working.
No more notifications
“The current experience of receiving notifications during meetings is highly distracting and there is no easy way to turn off these notifications making it highly painful for users,” Microsoft's Joao Ferreira wrote in an M365 admin post announcing the news.
“This feature will introduce a setting to help the user turn OFF notifications during meetings.”
In order to activate the setting, users need to click on the ellipsis next to their Microsoft Teams profile picture, then select global settings -> Notifications -> Meetings. Doing so will turn off notifications for all meetings.
(Image credit: Microsoft)
If users want to allow certain notifications to come through, say if they are expecting an important email or alert, users can turn notifications on or off for a per meeting basis through the setting provided in the meeting tray.
By allowing users to specify which types of alerts they receive, the latest Teams update should help address common remote working issues that have been increasingly facing workers across the world.
Ferreira noted that the feature is set to begin rolling out in early February, with most users set to have it ready by mid-March 2022. It will be available worldwide to all Microsoft Teams users across desktop and web.
News of the feature first emerged back in November 2021, with Microsoft Teams enjoying a raft of useful updates since then. This includes the addition of chat bubbles so that users wouldn't miss private messages sent during a video call, both 1:1 or as part of a group call.
Suffering a juddering scrolling experience with Microsoft Edge could soon be over thanks to a new update for the software set to launch soon.
Microsoft's browser is examining a new option to improve scrolling that will see users get a much smoother experience – but not everyone will be able to enjoy it just yet.
Available in the Edge Canary channel now, the update sees Edge using variable “screen refresh rate” when scrolling. The feature “allows Windows to temporarily boost the refresh rate up when scrolling…this provides an overall smoother scrolling experience,” the update notes.
Microsoft Edge VRR
However the change isn't set to be available to all users, as Microsoft notes that you'll need a VRR panel and a supporting driver to make sure it works as it should.
A VRR panel helps your device operate variable refresh rate (or VRR), giving you a smooth graphics experience. It's more common in gaming TVs and monitors, especially as next-gen consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X become more widespread.
The main job of VRR is to eliminate what's known as screen tearing, where the image on your TV shudders mid-frame before carrying on as before.
Screen tearing happens when your display's refresh of its image is out-of-sync with the rate at which your console or PC graphics card delivers frames. You end up with an on-screen image that sees, for example, the top half of the screen display one frame and the bottom the next.
This happens because TVs don’t refresh their entire screen image instantly. The driver of a display rapidly scans down the screen, usually from top to bottom, updating the state of each pixel. It often happens too fast for our eyes and brains to notice, until something goes wrong and it looks odd.
Tearing becomes noticeable when, for example, you use a 60Hz TV and the game’s framerate vacillates between 45fps and 60fps. It’s particularly obvious in fast-motion games like first-person shooters, where turning around quickly in-game leads to a huge difference in on-screen information from one frame to the next.
This may all seem a bit detached from using Microsoft Edge as a day-to-day browser, but with more users looking to view HD video and even virtual reality experiences through their browser, it's clear Microsoft feels it needs to keep up.
You can check your devices' Refresh rate panel on your Windows devices via the Start menu, then clicking on Settings > System > Display > Advanced display.
Microsoft is working on an update for PowerPoint that will give users ever greater creative freedom when it comes to presentation design.
According to new entries in the company’s product roadmap, PowerPoint will soon allow organizations to add their own custom fonts to presentations. The information is sparse, but presumably these custom fonts will be made available to all employees, once set.
The feature will first be made available via PowerPoint Online next month, and arrive for the Windows and Mac clients in March and June, respectively.
PowerPoint presentations
Although PowerPoint has long been the default presentation software for many businesses, the market has become much more competitive in recent years, and all the more so as a result of the rise of remote working.
In the face of increasingly stiff competition from the likes of Prezi and Google Slides, Microsoft has pushed out a range of improvements and integrations designed to cement its position.
For example, Microsoft 365 customers can now launch PowerPoint presentations from directly within Teams, the company’s popular collaboration platform. Known as PowerPoint Live, the feature eliminates the perilous practice of screen sharing, which has been responsible for various gaffes over the years.
Even more recently, Microsoft rolled out a recording studio for PowerPoint, which allows users to practice their presentations in advance. The idea is that reviewing the footage will help people hone their delivery and identify any areas in need of improvement.
The latest update, meanwhile, covers off the presentation design process, which is as equally important as rehearsal and execution. Although the introduction of custom fonts may appear comparatively insignificant, the update will allow businesses to establish consistency across their brand, which will be particularly useful when presenting to partners, investors and the like.
Alternatively, the facility could be used to add a bit of color and personality to otherwise bland presentations, which is always welcome.
As per three new entries to the company’s product roadmap, Microsoft Teams will soon allow users of Azure, Citrix and VMware virtual desktop services to utilize give and take controls during video meetings.
Give controls allow Teams users to recruit fellow attendees to help them present, make changes to a file and perform other actions. With take controls, meanwhile, people can request they be given these kinds of administrative privileges.
Virtualization and Microsoft Teams
As many organizations migrate to a hybrid working model, whereby workers split their time between the home and office, video meetings and virtual presentations will continue to play a major role in professional life.
It’s also common for companies to use virtual desktop infrastructure to enable secure remote work. But so far, people running Microsoft Teams in a virtual machine have not had access to the full breadth of functionality, including give and take controls.
The effect of this upcoming round of updates will be to create greater consistency across Microsoft Teams environments, and open up access to core presentation functionality to those required to use virtual desktop services by their IT teams.
Support for Azure Window Desktop and Citrix services is due to arrive in March, with support for VMware’s hypervisor set to follow one month later.
TechRadar Pro has asked Microsoft whether users of other popular virtualization services (Amazon WorkSpaces, Nutanix XI Frame etc.) can expect to benefit from similar updates in future.
There is a pleasing circularity to the recent career of Pip White, who in November took on the role of SVP & General Manager EMEA at collaboration software company Slack.
Previously, White had spent a number of years running the sales operation at CRM titan Salesforce, before departing for a job at Google’s cloud arm. In the summer of 2021, Salesforce finalized an acquisition of Slack worth $ 28 billion, and now White finds herself in familiar company.
A few months into her new role, TechRadarPro spoke to White about Slack’s ambitions for the coming year, with the pandemic continuing to confine many workers to their home offices.
The official party line goes a little something like this: Slack is the only viable digital headquarters for the hybrid working era, wherein we will all work in a fluid and asynchronous manner from a variety of locations. It’s a message we’ve heard many times over by now.
However, White also offered insight into the nature of the company’s relationship with its new parent organization, as well as the way it perceives its competition in the collaboration sector.
Slackforce
Asked why she traded in her position at Google Cloud for one at Slack, White explained that the acquisition by Salesforce played a large part, as did the platform’s role in the evolution of work.
“The opportunity to lead Slack in EMEA was a compelling one, especially in the context of the integration into Salesforce and the doors that has opened from an existing customer and growth perspective,” she explained.
“It was also about where we are in the world right now, in terms of the way people are thinking about different ways of working. Slack presents a really interesting opportunity at the forefront of that transformation.”
Having rolled out Slack internally prior to the acquisition, Salesforce was already equipped with a “really good feel for the technology”, White told us. And in future, the new parent company will help guide product development, as well as pursuing opportunities relating to the integration of Slack and Salesforce products.
(Image credit: Slack)
Slack founder and CEO Stuart Butterfield now reports in to Bret Taylor, who was recently appointed co-CEO at Salesforce. White describes this relationship as a “tight connection and collaboration” from a product perspective.
“It’s a case of collaboration, not of Salesforce taking over, or vice versa,” said White. “It’s about what’s in the best interests of our customers and how we can help them on this hybrid working journey.”
“Slack will be central to minimizing disruption and accelerating the opportunity for collaboration in this new digital economy, and even more so as a result of the new use cases we’ve been exploring since the acquisition.”
This may well prove to be the case, but Slack will first have to see off increasingly stiff competition from a number of directions.
What competition?
As a result of the pandemic and shift to remote working, the collaboration and video conferencing market has never been hotter, nor more competitive. According to a recent survey from Gartner, there has been a 44% rise in the use of collaboration tools since 2019.
These kinds of services have also become increasingly amorphous over the last couple of years, as the largest players continue to borrow features and design concepts from one another. In a venn diagram that maps out functionality, platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack and others would overlap significantly.
However, White doesn’t accept the notion that Slack can be easily compared with other services, nor that the platform faces serious competition. Asked specifically about the rivalry between Slack and Microsoft Teams, she told us: “it’s not necessarily an apples to apples comparison”.
This felt a touch disingenuous, given the commonalities between the two services; both offer text chat, group channels, audio calls, file sharing and integrations with third-party apps. In our mind, someone could be forgiven for thinking Slack and Teams are fruit of much the same tree.
“It’s not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.”
Pip White, Slack
In 2020, Slack also filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft over the bundling together of Teams and Office 365 services, which the company says amounts to an unfair advantage. Both White and Slack’s communications agency refused to be drawn into discussing the legal dispute, which is yet to be resolved, but its existence implies there is rivalry there.
Nonetheless, White is ardent that Slack offers a unique value proposition, courtesy of its push towards asynchronous collaboration, short and spontaneous huddles in place of time-hungry meetings, and rich third-party integrations.
“We will continue to innovate around these themes,” she told us. “All employers are thinking about how to approach cultural shifts and flux in the working environment; a lot of employees want different things.”
“The situation is going to continue to evolve, so it’s about anticipating change and being supremely flexible. Technologies that allow for asynchronous working away from the physical office will enable that journey.”
An automated future
Regardless of whether Slack faces direct opposition from services like Teams, however, the company obviously has a clear vision for the future of its software.
As announced in mid-November, Slack has “rebuilt and reengineered” large parts of the platform from the ground up. The main improvement is the introduction of a library of “building blocks” to the Slack Workflow Builder, which make it simpler to develop automations that eliminate the need to juggle many different business apps.
Building these automations requires no coding whatsoever; the Lego-like blocks can be chained together via a simple drag-and-drop mechanism, which means workers don’t have to rely on overburdened developer teams to code-in new functionality.
(Image credit: Slack)
If there is no available building block that fulfils a particular task, a developer can step in to create one on an employee’s behalf. This new block will then become available across the organization and can be “remixed” into various other workflows.
According to White, customers are beginning to utilize this and other new functionality to great effect, in ways that are not possible on any other platform.
“We see the ability to bring work into channel as a key differentiator for us. The way in which most of our customers are starting to use Slack in anger, so to speak, is all about the ability to collaborate endlessly from one process to another,” she said.
“We’re only beginning to see the start of changes to ways of working. A lot has changed in some sectors and digital transformation has undoubtedly been accelerated, but we’re still at the start of this journey. I think it’s a great opportunity for all of us to reconsider the ways in which we work.”
At a time when business are using web accessibility software to make their websites accessible to all, Microsoft has released a new add-on that does the same thing for its office software.
As over 1bn people are currently living with a disability, the software giant's Office Engineering team has created a new accessibility add-on for Microsoft Office called Accessibility Reminder.
According to a new blog post, Accessibility Reminder helps drive awareness of the importance of making your organization's Office documents accessible with tips and tricks to fix accessibility issues. With the app's comment feature, disabled users can also remind their fellow collaborators that something in a document needs to be changed so that they can see or hear it.
The Accessibility Reminder app is currently available in Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint for both desktop and the web.
Accessibility Reminder app
Microsoft's new Accessibility Reminder app allows users to insert reminder comments in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides to spread awareness of any issues they have when trying to collaborate with others.
In addition to more general comments, users can also create custom comments to notify specific document authors and include personalized messages, organization-specific links, training and more.
To install Microsoft's Accessibility Reminder app, you first need to navigate to this website, sign in with your Microsoft 365 email address and fill out a short form. From here, you'll be taken to the Microsoft Garage project download site where you can specify which applications you want to install and use the app in.
While Microsoft released its Adaptive Controller back in 2018 to help disabled gamers play games on Xbox and PC, its new Accessibility Reminder app will likely be a big help for them when working from home and collaborating with their co-workers in documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Microsoft has achieved a major milestone after its ad network – spread across Bing, Outlook.com, AOL, MSN.com, Yahoo, and other properties – reached one billion people last year.
The news comes via MediaPost, which cites Microsoft internal data and ComScore as evidence of the huge reach of the company's ad business.
According to Microsoft, many of the viewers are “overlapping audiences” – the term used for when an audience member uses multiple properties or services from the company at once. As such, 64% of US Windows users also visited a Microsoft service in Q3 2021.
How did we get here?
You might be wondering how Microsoft has somehow managed to create an ad business that compares to Google and Facebook and the answer is essentially that Microsoft has been plugging away for a long time to get here.
Back in 2006, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to supply ad inventory to the growing service, giving the former much-needed eyeballs and letting Facebook focus on growing its service.
The success of MSN.com has also played a role. According to Alexa.com, MSN.com records an average of 40 million daily visits, ranking 59th in the world. The news service, which often aggregates others, outranks CNN.com by this metric.
Microsoft also recently acquired AT&T's programmatic ad marketplace Xandr, suggesting the company's ambitions are extensive.
In order to get users to spend more time on its professional social network, LinkedIn is preparing to launch a new virtual events platform for both audio and video.
As reported by TechCrunch, the company's new events platform will allow creators and organizations to list, host and market interactive virtual events.
LinkedIn actually began looking into events before the pandemic began with the launch of its Events hub back in 2019. However, as more people started working from home, the company added online polls and video events to provide remote workers with access to events.
Now though with its new virtual events platform, LinkedIn will start out with an audio-only product similar to Clubhouse that will launch in beta this month followed by a video version that will be available in the spring.
Audio and video events
When LinkedIn's new events platform launches in beta later this month, organizers won't have to rely on other third-party software as it will include all of the tools needed to run interactive content from end-to-end.
Hosts will be able to record and run their events straight from LinkedIn as the new platform will include tools for online attendees and hosts to have live conversations and moderate discussions. However, attendees will also be able to communicate with one another both during and after an event has ended. Promoting these events will be a cinch as well as organizers can do so on LinkedIn.
The platform will start off by targeting individual creators who already rely on the professional social network to connect with a wider audience and cover topics such as career development and recruitment.
Product manager at LinkedIn, Jake Poses provided further details on the company's philosophy when it comes to its new virtual event platform for audio and video in an interview with TechCrunch, saying:
“Our philosophy is to put the organizers in control. We want to make it easier to host virtual round tables, fireside chats, and more. Some may want the event to be more formal, or less formal. Some might want to communicate with their audience, to open up to the floor. We’re giving professionals interactivity and support.”
We'll likely hear more from LinkedIn once the audio-only portion of its new virtual events platform begins rolling out in beta later this month.
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