Brand New Features #
Video Transcript: #
We’ve talked about what’s happened to Teams over the course of the last few months. The virus is obviously fueled some of the growth, but it’s not the whole story. We know that this growth was already underway. We know that they already passed up some of their competitors from market share before the outbreak.
But while the growth has been going on, there’s been an evolution in what Microsoft makes possible inside of Teams, and that’s critical for us. And I want to show you some of the ones that are coming out this month because they’re releasing four or five major new features every month and they tell us about it a couple of days before the month starts.
So I’m gonna walk you through a couple that have been really recent here, screen recording. I should point out that things like the new meeting experience which rolled out just two weeks ago, they don’t hit everyone on the same day.
So Microsoft Teams has such a widespread footprint that they’ll roll it out over the course of a week or two so you don’t have one of these features and someone else in the meeting does, they just haven’t gotten it to you yet. They will within the next couple weeks.
So screen recording. You can now use the Microsoft Stream video service in Office 365 to create short desktop, recordings of applications, including your camera and microphone straight into the browser with no software needed. And this is really great. If you want to create a short tutorial for your staff and upload the video to Stream to share it inside of your organization.
Now, you need the desktop version of Chrome or Edge, Safari won’t work for this, Firefox won’t work for this, mobile versions of this won’t work, desktop, chrome, desktop edge, and it’s going to work for you. You open Stream, which is part of your 365 experience. You click on, create, you can see the screen over here, it’s grayed out, but you can see create there, it’ll open a drop down box and record screen is one of the options.
So you’ll see a record your screen camera window will open up, make sure that you will allow the browser to access your camera and mic. It may come up with it with a question of permissions request. Having the camera on allows you to record yourself as well as the screen, you’re showing to get that picture and picture effect that people like to use.
You have a 15 minute max but you can pause, you can resume. You can record again. If you don’t like what you got, once you decide that you want to upload, you get the screen that you see here. So open up a window on the side, you give it a catchy name and give it a good description and you drop down the language.
This is important. What language you want the transcript of the video to be in. Stream will automatically transcribe the video based on your choice of language and there are something like 70 languages that you can transcribe this in right now. And that number grows all the time as well.
You decide who inside your organization is allowed to look at your video. If you leave the box checked, that’s the default you allow everyone. If you uncheck the box, it’ll open up a box here giving you permissions to choose whether you want certain channels, certain groups or even individuals.
Once you’ve decided that you like that, you press the publish button and the video becomes available in Stream. And from there, you can grab a hyperlink or embed code. Share it out. Drag it into Teams itself. You’re off to the races.
Does anyone remember Nextel phones? I don’t know how old people are here.
I sure remember them, this goes back about 20 years. Motorola, was rolling out these chirping walkie talkie phones. You’d be standing in line at Wendy’s and someone’s phone would chirp and 11, people would reach into their pocket and take a look to see if it was theirs because they all sounded the same, it was a walkie-talkie, the phone would chirp and you’d hear someone’s voice on the other end saying, “Hey Mike, you’re gonna be back in the office. If you stop at Wendy’s, get me a shake.” and you’d hit tap to talk and say, “Yep, I’ll bring you back a vanilla shake. See you soon.” and you’re in business.
There’s good things about that immediacy in the right hands is very good thing. Teems has, rolled it out for your cell phones if you’re an Android user. They have not gotten to iOS yet, it won’t work on the iPhone, but it will work on your Android phones sometime this month. And you’ll be able to tap to talk to any member of your organization that you are connected to within Teams and they’ll be able to get you back right away.
The channel summary button. This just showed up on my screen yesterday it’s up here in the upper right of the channel, little information blue information button and if you click on that, it opens up this window, it tells you what the channel is for and more importantly who belongs to it and you can scroll down see all 20 members that are belonging to this channel. It’s good sometimes because we’ll be in the middle of a conversation and we won’t know for a moment whether so and so has seen to some of the conversation that’s preceded. This way you’ll always know. Channel summary button, brand new feature, just rolled out.
Merging calls, you know now that you can pop out your calls into separate windows, you’ve seen that during our presentations.
Now, you can merge your call. Just as you do on your smartphones, the three dots over here, if you ever find yourself foundering in Teams, and can’t quite remember where you saw something you want to do, start with the three dots button, start with that ellipsis all the time, but here you can control your calls.
Hold calls, park calls, transfer calls, just like in any telephone system, and then you can merge them now as well. There are a lot of organizations that are in the process right now of exploring, how to make Microsoft 365 their primary phone system, just imagine the savings involved with that. Microsoft 365, you’re already paying for that.
Task planner, unify your tasks inside of Microsoft, people set up tasks in planner which is one of their apps, in to do which you still come across once in a while. In Outlook, you’ll get a assigned tasks sometimes. Trying to stay on top of all of these different tasks venues can be a little bit tough.
So Teams, since that’s where we’re working all day, Teams is pulled them in to a single view. You’ll be able to take a look at your task, in a single pane of glass, is what you like to say.
Together mode. Some people find 49 separate windows a little disconcerting, they find a little bit easier to imagine your teammates sitting in the same auditorium, all looking at the same content.
So that’s what Microsoft together mode does, enables us all to kind of look as though, we’re in the same room, a little bit better than it does when we’re all calling in from our own homes. There are people who are doing really good things about this.
The national basketball association is one of them, I don’t know if you guys are basketball fans, but I’m gonna show you a little bit of what the NBA is doing.
The NBA as begun using together mode to virtually populate the arena where their games are taking place. They pipe in crowd sounds and fans of Teams have been sending in applications to become the viewers that they show on the sidelines behind the bench. So you can actually get behind the bet and wave your arms when someone wants to get a free throw and see if you can distract them a little bit.
So right there, you’ve got an example of the Teams together mode, sort of changing the game a little bit.
