Microsoft has rolled out an update for Teams that will change the way many people collaborate with colleagues and perform their daily tasks on the platform.
The update introduces functionality from Microsoft Loop, a new application designed to help workers cooperate on tasks in real-time with portable components that synchronize across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
As per a new blog post, Loop components have now arrived for Microsoft Teams, unlocking a variety of opportunities to streamline workflows, as well as minimizing the number of apps workers are required to juggle.
For example, users can post a data table or list of actions into a Teams channel, where all members are able to edit the content and see any changes live. The content will also remain up-to-date wherever else the components have been deployed (say, in a Word document or PowerPoint presentation).
“Loop components offer teams more flexibility in how they get work done – ensuring everyone always has access to the latest information. Where it is contributing in real-time or at a time that better fits your team’s schedule, Loop components enable you and your team to stay connected without worrying about working with stable information,” explained Microsoft.
Microsoft Loop comes to Teams
First unveiled at Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference last month, Loop is made up of three elements: components, pages and workspaces.
Loop workspaces are shared spaces that contain everything relevant to a specific project. Loop pages, meanwhile, are described as “flexible canvases” where users can organize their various components and draw in files, links or data.
“For years, the established patterns of work were clear. Communication took place via email and content creation was mostly documents, spreadsheets and presentations,” wrote Microsoft in a separate blog post, when Loop was first announced.
“In the last 18 months, the world has changed, and we have adapted to a new working environment where people had to complement traditional communication tools and in-person collaboration with alternative solutions. But we need to go further. That is why we are reimagining Office, adding new apps to respond to new opportunities, and making Office a universal, interactive canvas.”
Deployed in Microsoft Teams, Loop components have the potential to change the way remote and hybrid workers collaborate with colleagues in a significant way. And this is just the start, Microsoft says; additional components are expected to be announced at Microsoft Build next year.
Microsoft is working on a simple update for Teams that should help address common issues with international collaboration.
According to a new entry in the company’s product roadmap, Microsoft Teams users will soon benefit from a facility that highlights each users’ current time-zone.
“You can easily find out the local time of the people you collaborate with by checking the profile card,” the listing explains.
The feature is still currently under development, but should roll out to all Microsoft Teams users by the end of January, 2022.
Microsoft Teams on tour
Although small businesses are less likely to make use of the new local time feature, it could prove extremely helpful for employees at larger enterprises with colleagues scattered across the globe, or for anyone who travels regularly for work.
For example, the ability to quickly check which colleagues are online and when should make it easier for managers to schedule a cross-team meeting or determine to whom to delegate a time-sensitive task.
If someone has their notifications turned on, meanwhile, the new feature will minimize the chances of a colleague disturbing them at an inopportune time with an unimportant task or query.
Since the transition to remote working, many people have also developed the habit of leaving messages for co-workers to discover when they first log on in the morning. Although the utility of this practice is obvious, it has the effect of making the person feel bombarded before they’ve had a chance to get their feet under the desk.
While the new time-zone feature does nothing to disincentivize this practice, the likelihood of accidentally falling foul of the collaboration faux pas is lessened.
For those unfamiliar, guest access allows businesses to provides access to teams, documents in channels, resources, chats and applications to those outside of their organization while still maintaining control over their corporate data.
Guests may include partners, vendors, suppliers or consultants and anyone with a business account like Azure Active Directory or an account for an email service like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail can participate as a guest in Teams.
Now tough, Microsoft will give guests even more control over their experience in Teams by allowing them to decline invitations, initiate leaving an organization and manage the guest tenant list.
Be our guest
In a new post on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the software giant has revealed that guests will now be able to do even more in Teams.
For instance, guest users will now be able to decline a pending guest invitation within the Teams app and when they click “Decline”, the Teams Tenant List will not show the tenant with the pending invitation in the Account Management tab. Guest users can now also initiate leaving an org and when they click on “Leave Org” they will be guided on how to leave a tenant from both Teams and the company's Azure Portal.
Finally, guest users can now manage the guest tenant list in Teams by choosing to hide or show guest tenants in the menu of Microsoft's video conferencing software.
Being able to collaborate with others from outside one's organization is one of the best features in Teams and through this new update, which is expected to roll out in December, guests will have more control over their experience when doing so.
A coalition of software and cloud companies has filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior of bundling its OneDrive cloud storage, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and Windows 11.
The Coalition for a Level Playing Field includes several European Union (EU)-based companies led by open source hosted cloud storage vendor Nextcloud.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the [web] browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators' product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating,” says Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
Big Tech
Arguing that Microsoft’s behavior is bad for the consumers, the coalition has asked the EC to enforce a level playing field for all the players, and ensure that Microsoft doesn’t leverage its dominant market position in the operating system sector to drive out competition in other segments.
Besides Nextcloud, the coalition includes several prominent open source, and non-profit organizations, such as European DIGITAL SME Alliance, the Document Foundation,and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
On their homepage, the coalition suggests that the anti-competitive behaviour of Big Tech is not only killing competition, but in doing so is harming the consumers and business.
“Microsoft is integrating [Microsoft] 365 deeper and deeper in their service and software portfolio, including Windows. OneDrive is pushed wherever users deal with file storage and Teams is a default part of Windows 11. This makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] services,” reasons the coalition.
To further drive home the point, it argues that while Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have grown their market share to 66% in the EU, the share of local providers has contracted from 26% to 16%.
Microsoft is working on a new update for its video conferencing software that will allow organizations with supported devices to use multiple cameras in Microsoft Teams.
There is a catch though as this new multiple camera feature will only work on select Microsoft Teams Rooms devices.
For those unfamiliar, Microsoft Teams Rooms is a dedicated hardware and software solution for video conferencing that was previously called Skype Rooms. Microsoft Teams Rooms devices include headsets, speakerphones, desk phones and Teams displays, collaboration bars, webcams and more.
According to a new post on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, this feature is currently in development and is slated to roll out to Microsoft Teams Rooms devices like the Surface Hub 2S in January of next year.
Switching between multiple cameras
Once this new feature is available, organizations that have a meeting or conference room with more than one video camera connected to Microsoft Teams Rooms will be able to switch between them while in a video call.
To do so, they'll need to click on the icon that depicts an arrow going through a rectangle at the bottom of a Teams meeting to see a list of available cameras. From here, they'll be able to switch between cameras seamlessly without interrupting their meeting.
As more devices have built-in cameras than ever before, this new update to Microsoft Teams Rooms will allow organizations to take advantage of them. Some possible use cases include being able to switch between a wide group shot and having one individual on camera as well as being able to give attendees a close up view of a product or design.
Now that Microsoft is adding multiple camera support to Microsoft Teams Rooms, the company could eventually add this same functionality to regular Teams meetings so that individuals can also give their meetings more of a cinematic feel.
Available now, Teams Essentials provides small businesses with an affordable meeting solution that is ideal for hybrid work environments. At just $ 4 per user per month, the software giant's new offering is one of the most competitively priced video conferencing and collaboration solutions on the market today.
“We know how difficult the past 20 months have been for small businesses,” noted Microsoft's corporate vice president of Modern Work, Jared Spataro. “They’ve had to demonstrate extreme flexibility to adapt, often with limited access to tools and technology. Teams Essentials is built specifically to meet the unique needs of small businesses, enabling them to thrive in this new era of work.”
Microsoft Teams Essentials
SMBs that sign up for Teams Essentials will be able to hold unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours and meetings with up to 300 people but they'll also get access to 10GB of cloud storage per user.
Teams Essentials also includes all of the existing and upcoming capabilities available in the free version of Teams such as easy invitations that only require an email address, Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar integration, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, always-available chats, polls and more.
Small businesses interested in purchasing Teams Essentials subscriptions for their employees can do so directly through the Teams website or from a variety of Microsoft Cloud Partners including ALSO, Crayon, Ingram, Pax8, Rhipe, TD Synnex, Telefonica (ES), Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone (IT) and Wortmann AG.
While Teams Essentials makes sense for small businesses that want to continue using their existing office software, for just $ 1 more at $ 5 per user per month, they can sign up for Microsoft 365 Business Basic which also includes access to the web and mobile versions of Microsoft's Office apps, 1TB of cloud storage per user, business-class email, Teams meetings recordings with transcripts and more.
Microsoft is set to roll out an update for collaboration platform Teams that will add a layer of friction to using third-party app integrations, but for good reason.
According to a new entry in the company’s product roadmap, Microsoft Teams users will soon have to manage permissions manually for each third-party app they want to use via the web client.
“In order to better secure Microsoft Teams third-party applications that request native device permissions – such as camera, microphone or location access – we will be requiring users to manually opt-in for these permissions per app in the Microsoft Teams web browser experience,” wrote Microsoft.
This is already the case across the Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile clients, the roadmap entry goes on to explain.
The new web client permissions system is still under development, but should take effect for all users by February next year.
Microsoft Teams apps
Since the start of the pandemic, collaboration software vendors like Microsoft, Zoom and Slack have worked hard to expand upon in-built functionality (video conferencing, VoIP, messaging, file-sharing etc.) with third-party integrations.
In Microsoft’s case, the company is aiming to turn Teams into a central hub for work, by building as wide a range of functionality into the platform as possible, from cloud storage and CRM to project management, calendering and more.
Only last week, Microsoft revealed it is developing a new-look app store that should make it easier to identify the most useful third-party integrations on a per user basis.
As the number of Teams applications grows, however, the likelihood one might be abused for cybercriminal purposes rises too. To nip any potential issues in the bud, Microsoft will soon require users to manually specify app permissions across all Teams clients (desktop, mobile and now browser).
Of course, the measure won’t stop users from giving malicious apps access to their webcam and audio feed, but at the very least it will force people to think twice about which apps they engage with.
Microsoft has released a new preview build of Windows 11 that makes it even easier to share content from other apps to Microsoft Teams with attendees while in a meeting.
With the release of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22499 to the software giant's Dev Channel, Microsoft is rolling out a new feature that allows Teams users to quickly share content from open app windows directly from Windows 11's taskbar to their video calls.
This new update builds on another recently released feature that introduced the ability to quickly mute and unmute active meeting calls right from the taskbar.
By making it easier to share content during Teams calls, Microsoft will eliminate the need to switch back and forth between apps just to share or reshare a window. With less interruptions, meeting attendees will have a much easier time focusing on their meetings in Teams.
Sharing open windows in Teams
Windows 11 Insiders can now test out this feature after downloading the latest preview build of Microsoft's new operating system.
When in a meeting in Microsoft Teams, users can share content from their open windows by hovering over the apps in their taskbar. A new “Share this window” button will appear underneath an app's preview and by clicking on it, they can share their open windows with other attendees in a video call. By hovering over the window again and clicking “Stop Sharing”, users can stop Teams from showing content on their PC or they can also choose another window to share content from it instead.
This new feature also works while presenting full screen presentations in PowerPoint and by moving your mouse to the bottom, the taskbar will pop up so that users can share or stop sharing their presentations without interrupting attendees.
According to a new blog post from Microsoft, the company is rolling out this new feature to a subset of Windows Insiders with Teams for work or school installed though it will be rolled out to even more users at a later date. The software giant also plans to bring this functionality to Chat from Microsoft Teams (Microsoft Teams for Home) at a later date.
Working together with others outside your organization in Microsoft Teams will soon be possible thanks to a new update to Microsoft's online collaboration tool.
Workgroups often extend beyond one's organization with employees connecting with multiple external stakeholders including customers, vendors and partners. However, up until now, users had to rely on different software or even personal apps to collaborate with them.
Not only does this require employees to use multiple apps which takes longer and can reduce their productivity, it also creates security risks for both workers and their companies.
For this reason, Microsoft is currently working on two updates that leverage Microsoft Teams Connect and the secure access capabilities of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to make cross-organizational collaboration easier for businesses.
Cross-organizational collaboration
The first update involves shared channels which allow individuals and teams across multiple organizations to work together in Microsoft Teams. When this feature becomes available in preview early next year, shared channels will appear within each Member's Teams tenant alongside other teams and channels.
Users will also be able to schedule a shared channel meeting, use other Microsoft apps like Office and share each channel with up to 50 teams and as many organizations as they need. Meanwhile, admins can use cross-tenant access settings in Azure AD to configure granular and differentiated trust relationships for external collaboration with different organizations.
Microsoft is also working on another update scheduled to rollout by the end of this year that will enable Teams users to chat with others outside their network including those using Teams personal accounts. They'll be able to invite any Teams user to chat using an email address or phone number while remaining within the security and compliance policies of their organization.
Cross-organizational collaboration is the Teams update many users have been waiting for as it will allow Microsoft's collaboration tool and video conferencing software to become a one-stop-shop for all of their business dealings both internally and externally.
Jim Szafranski never really wanted to become a CEO; it was something that seemed to happen to him, rather than something he deliberately made happen. But as it turns out, he has a knack for it.
Szafranski took over at visual communications company Prezi roughly eighteen months ago to preside over a change of direction, replacing founder Peter Arvai. Previously, the firm had specialized in design and presentation software, but has now turned its attention to video presentations.
Prezi had already begun to lay the foundations for this shift before the pandemic, but remote working saw demand skyrocket for a service that could help people create and deliver professional virtual presentations. The company put its foot on the gas and Prezi Video is now its flagship product.
As one of the main architects of the Prezi Video project, and as someone who had worked with the video conferencing titans (such as Microsoft and Google) in a previous life, Szafranski found himself next in line for the throne.
The right person for the job
Although he has now acclimatized to the level and breadth of responsibility that falls on the shoulders of a chief executive, Szafranski told TechRadar Pro he sometimes found himself doubting his suitability for the role.
While he had always been a student of both business and technology, and had racked up many years of experience at an executive level, he was to some extent blindsided by the opportunity when it presented itself.
“I love to learn, so I always tried to put myself in a position where I could learn from my environment and the people around me. And I kind of let the growth take care of itself,” he explained.
“But when I joined Prezi, the plan wasn’t that I would someday take over from Peter [Arvai] – that wasn’t even a discussion. The focus was on scaling the business and building out functions like sales and marketing.”
After some consideration, Szafranski agreed to take on the post, giving himself and Arvai three months to put the necessary measures in place. The best piece of advice Szafranski received during this time, he says, was simply to be himself, and not to emulate the archetypal CEO of the movies.
“Obviously, the board of directors and previous CEO thought about this carefully and chose to elect me for the role. This advice was an important reminder to approach situations in the same way I have always done; to do what felt natural.”
Mercifully, stepping into the CEO role at Prezi has not required Szafranski to tear it all up and start again, because he had inherited the foundations of a healthy business. His task is only to steer in a slightly different direction.
Virtual presentations, but different
Szafranski is often quizzed about what makes Prezi Video different from regular virtual presentation services. With words alone, this question can be a little difficult to answer, but the difference becomes immediately apparent when you see the product in action.
Prezi Video sits like a veneer on top of video conferencing services (Zoom, Teams, Meet etc.), adding a layer of gloss and interactivity that makes presentations much more attractive to the eye.
Unlike with traditional screen-sharing, which conceals the presenter’s video feed, users can bring content onto the screen alongside them in the style of a news anchor. In turn, the presenter is able to see more of the other attendees, which is supposed to help them read the room in the same way they might in-person.
Prezi Video also allows users to interact with on-screen content in real-time, which makes presentations feel slick and polished. There’s no more “next slide, please”; the presenter becomes more like a conductor.
According to Szafranksi, these attributes go a long way to solving the various issues employees have encountered since the transition to remote working, from video conferencing fatigue to a feeling of disconnect with coworkers.
“Ultimately, Prezi Video is about creating a greater level of engagement,” he told us. “People are talking a lot about Zoom fatigue at the moment, but will still log off in the evening to watch a couple of hours of Netflix. Prezi brings TV-like engagement into your business.”
Prezi video in action. (Image credit: Prezi)
Szafranski also sees products like Prezi Video playing a fundamental role as businesses emerge from the pandemic, by creating a stronger feeling of connection between meeting attendees spread across multiple locations.
“The office was the great productivity hack, because it forced everyone into the same space at the same time. But we’re not going back to that,” he said.
“What has permanently changed is that there will be somebody outside the room at all times, and we’re all going to have to figure out how to hold effective meetings under these conditions.”
Further down the line, Szafranksi envisions Prezi moving into areas like virtual reality, which could open up a new realm of opportunity for interactivity, as well as bringing everyone into the same arena once again.
Looking to the future
As the world climbs out from underneath the pandemic, which brought about a period of extreme and unexpected growth for Prezi, Szafranski is thinking closely about how he can carry momentum forward.
His first step, he explained, has been to surround himself with an executive team capable of putting his vision into action. For example, his new CTO is an expert in content ingestion, having cut his teeth at image library Shutterstock, and Szafranski recently brought onboard a new SVP for Product Management to explore opportunities in immersive video and 3D.
These appointments were designed to prepare the company for a shift in gear. In addition to targeting SMBs and design departments, Szafranski says the goal is now to take Prezi organization-wide at some of the largest companies on the planet.
However, an important question hangs over these ambitions: why don’t the video conferencing giants, with all their money and resources, go out and develop identical functionality? The early warning signs are there; Microsoft recently rolled out a new reporter mode for Teams that allows users to appear in front of shared content.
But Szafranksi says copying Prezi is far more difficult than it might seem. He describes the company’s intellectual property as much more like a game engine (such as Unity) than a piece of software.
“What Prezi does that’s special is serve up content in very spacial ways, which creates much more interactive and layered experiences. And these qualities are certainly not trivial to recreate.”
The alternative for the video conferencing giants, of course, would be an acquisition. Asked whether he thought Microsoft or Zoom might swoop in for Prezi, Szafranski played it cool. It would be his responsibility to field all such offers, he told us, but for now his efforts are focused wholly on taking Prezi in the right direction.
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