Transcription
[MUSIC]
WENDY ARNETT: Hello and welcome. I'm Wendy Arnett, a principal Product Manager in Teams. On behalf of our team, thanks for taking the time to join us today for Connect and Collaborate, New in Microsoft Teams. In this session, we're excited to share with you some of the latest updates coming to Microsoft Teams. We'll share new features for Teams meetings, designed to make your meetings more intelligent and secure. We'll also explore new capabilities for large-scale meetings like town halls, built to help you conduct engaging and interactive events. Next, we'll delve into new innovations coming to Teams Rooms and devices, created to bridge the gap between people working in the office and those working remotely. And finally, we'll showcase the latest advancements in Teams Phone, bringing you the best in communication technology.
Please note that some of the capabilities we discuss today may require a separate license, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams Premium, or Teams Rooms Pro. For more details, you can work with your account representatives or visit our website.
First, I'm going to pass it off to Margi, who'll get us started with Meetings. Let's get going.
MARGI DESAI: Thanks, Wendy. Hi, I'm Margi Desai, a Product Manager for Microsoft Teams, and today I'll be sharing some of the latest advancements we are bringing to Meetings and Events to make the real-time collaboration experience intelligent, secure, and engaging. AI is transforming the way we work, empowering people to be more efficient than ever. One of the most popular AI-powered tools we've introduced is Intelligent Recap. Intelligent Recap has become the go-to feature for catching up on past meetings. It is built in, automated, and offers an easy-to-navigate experience for everyone to catch up on completed meetings. With features like AI-generated Notes and Tasks, along with video timeline markers, chapters, and topics, it allows you to easily reach out to specific parts of a meeting, and catch up without missing the details. This powerful tool can help you focus on what matters the most, without worrying about missing out or falling behind. Plus it allows you to stay engaged in the meeting without having to take notes. And we're making it easier to share the Recap insights with others. Soon you'll be able to share a link to others in your organization that will open the Recap page for them directly. And for external participants, we're adding a sharing option through Outlook. This will draft an email with the AI-generated Notes and Tasks from the meeting ready for you to review, make necessary changes, and send to external participants. With these updates, people can stay organized, informed, and collaborate intelligently through any type of meeting or calls that they make in Teams.
But collaboration means breaking barriers, and that includes language. In Global Teams, language differences can sometimes hinder effective communication and collaboration. For meetings where attendees speak different languages, we are introducing real-time speech-to-speech language interpretation powered by AI. This capability enables interpretation in Teams meetings so each meeting participant can speak and listen in the language of their choice, instantly overcoming language barriers. Meeting participants can also have the interpreter simulate their personal voice for a more inclusive experience. Let's take a look at an example.
[NON-ENGLISH]
SPEAKER 1: Hello, everyone. I am Marie Dubois, Director of International Affairs and Electronic Elite.
[NON-ENGLISH]
SPEAKER 2: I'm Zhang Wei, the Chief Business Officer of Technology Innovation. We are excited about your ideas and can provide strong technical support in the field of emerging materials, intelligent manufacturing technology, and jointly develop more advanced electronic products.
MARGI DESAI: By leveraging AI for interpretation, we're making meetings more inclusive and engaging for attendees that speak different languages. Microsoft Teams is your go-to platform for collaboration and communication, capable of scaling from focused one-on-ones to large-scale, more structured, and high-production events like town halls. For all your meeting types, we're introducing a new expanded gallery view, that helps you stay engaged with participants, even if your primary Meeting window is minimized. When screen sharing, the expanded gallery view will automatically display up to four participants, a preview of content being shared, and the presenter video if their camera is on. This makes it easier to manage participant interactions like responding to raised hands and monitoring videos in chat, helping you maintain meaningful engagements during your presentations.
For large-scale events, we are making it easier for all attendees to engage and interact with the presenters and amongst each other in a large town hall experience. First, we're scaling events up to 50,000 concurrent users. This means you can host even larger events without worrying about capacity limits, ensuring that everyone in your attendant audience can join and participate. To further enhance participation, we are introducing streaming chat for Teams town hall, allowing participants to engage real-time during the event, enhancing interactions among attendees and organizers, and keeping everyone connected. Town hall organizers can enable or disable this feature, based on their preferences, whether they want to maximize participation, or focus on the content of the event. We've also refined the Q&A experience for town halls, helping organizers and attendees engage more actively. Attendees can now upload questions, making it easy for moderators to address the most popular questions first. Additionally, private replies enable moderators to have a private one-on-one conversation within the Q&A experience. This helps to clarify questions before they are made visible to everyone in the town hall. For attendees looking to catch up on a town hall, we're enabling digital video recorder, or DVR, controls, which allow users to pause or rewind a live, ongoing town hall. And for those leveraging integrations, we are also excited to announce general availability of Teams town hall and webinar Graph APIs. The town hall and webinar APIs enable seamless integration with various systems and platforms, providing advanced event management capabilities and robust analytics. We have partnered closely with HubSpot to launch our Teams and HubSpot webinar integrations. We've also partnered with Zapier to launch integrations with their popular marketing automation software. With all these enhancements in Teams, you can now deliver professionally-produced, highly engaging town hall events at scale.
Let's move on to how you can protect confidential and sensitive information shared in meetings. We are excited to introduce Active Meeting Protection alerts, powered by AI to help secure your screenshare sessions. Imagine you're in a meeting discussing a project, and accidentally reveal a customer account number or a Social Security number. This feature detects sensitive information, and notifies you, ensuring that confidential details aren't unintentionally shared. We're also expanding the existing control that prevents copying or forwarding of meeting chat. This will now apply to live captions, transcription, and meeting recap, further safeguarding information shared during the meeting. Additionally, a new, per-user meeting policy further limits information-sharing via chat. For meetings organized by specific individuals in attendance, this policy will disable participants' ability to send messages in the meeting chat before or after the meeting. When one of the in-meeting only values are selected, participants can read past chat history, but no one can send messages in the meeting chat, unless the meeting is active. This policy ensures that meeting chat remains focused and secure by allowing participants to send messages only during the active meeting. We are also expanding the current watermark functionality available in Meetings to webinars. This will provide a visible deterrent against unauthorized sharing, safeguarding confidential and sensitive information shared even in open and large forums, like webinars. Watermarks are also supported in meetings where unauthenticated guests are joined. This watermark will clearly display the name they used to join the meeting in your tenant, acting as a deterrent against unauthorized sharing. The other thing on our security measures for external participants, we're introducing an option for organizers to prompt guests to perform a lightweight authentication via a one-time passcode, sent to the email address used to invite them to the meeting. By sending a unique password to each participant, you can prevent unauthorized access and ensure that only the intended individuals are in the meeting. This adds an extra layer of security, giving you the confidence and peace of mind that only authorized participants are in the room. With these security advancements, you can confidently share and collaborate, knowing your information in a Microsoft Teams meeting is safeguarded at every step.
And that's a wrap from my side. But now, let's dive deep into innovations coming to Teams Phones and devices. And for that, I'll hand it over to Sandhya.
SANDHYA RAO: Thanks, Margi. Hi. I'm Sandhya Rao, Principal Group Product Manager for Teams Rooms and devices, and I'm excited to talk to you about our new innovations in the workplace. Even as flexible work becomes more common, many organizations still grapple with the challenges it brings. Studies have shown that less than half of global knowledge workers report seeing the people that matter to them when they come into the office. And 65% of office space remains underutilized. We are on a mission to help people maximize their time in the office, and AI is helping unlock new levels of coordination, modernization, and optimization. Specifically, our workplace solutions help customers coordinate productively across flexible workspaces, modernize intelligently in those spaces, and effectively optimize them through management and insights. Teams Rooms continues to be the best and most consistent meeting experience, providing advanced features for end users and IT admins. So let's take a look at some of the new features for Teams Rooms. We're delighted to announce that Teams Rooms now supports digital signage. With digital signage, Teams Rooms becomes a place for you to share customized content across your offices. Digital signage can be easily managed in the Pro management portal. We're also excited to partner with Appspace and XOGO on digital signage integration. And we continue to hear feedback on just how important cross-platform interoperability is to our customers. So we're very excited to announce that Teams Rooms is expanding beyond direct-guest join to now include cross-platform meetings via SIP. This capability makes it easier to meet with anyone in a Teams Room, as it allows Teams Rooms' devices to make audio or video calls with other conferencing endpoints that supports SIP or H323. In addition, it provides feature enhancements, including improved audio and video quality, dual screen support, Join by ID, and content share with HDMI [inaudible]. We're continuously working to enhance the camera views of people in a Teams Room, so that everyone can be seen clearly. With multi-camera view, remote participants can simultaneously view up to four streams for the Teams Rooms, and can switch between available angles to select their preferred view. Designed for high-impact spaces, this feature brings remote users closer to the action in meetings like all-hands or town halls. Now people joining remotely can see both the presenters and the audience at the same time, making it easier to follow the meeting, and create a richer, more inclusive experience.
Speaking of town halls, with more employees returning to the office, Rooms are once again playing an integral role with these kinds of meetings. Teams Rooms will now support presenter roles for Teams town halls, webinars, and structured meetings with features like ring room access and stage control, organizers can present directly from a Teams Room with more options for in-person facilitation in event scenarios. We're continually working to deliver uniform experiences across Teams Rooms on Windows and Teams Rooms on Android. We're happy to announce that Teams Rooms on Android will soon support in-room voice recognition to better support Teams Intelligent Recap, and Copilot, making your meetings more productive and impactful with AI. Additional features already released or coming soon to Teams Rooms on Android include custom backgrounds, 3x3 video gallery on dual displays, user feedback polling, and the ability to view intelligent video streams from other rooms.
Now let's turn to additional shared spaces at work, such as bring your own device or BYOD rooms, and shared bookable desks. Sharing your work location makes it easier to connect and coordinate with coworkers who are in the office. Now when you connect to peripherals in a BYOD room, or at a bookable desk, your work location will be automatically set to your building information, so long as you and your admin have provided permission to do so. This makes collaboration with coworkers in the office faster and easier. We're also excited to share updates coming this year to the end user experience in BYOD rooms. First, when you use USB to connect your laptop to a shared peripheral, Teams will automatically detect the room's audio on the pre-join screen and recommend that the user uses the audio device that's pre-selected for their meeting. Once in the meeting, Teams will list you as an in-room participant on the meeting roster. This is the same experience as when you use Proximity Join on your PC with a Teams Room to join a meeting. Grouping in-room participants enables individual identification in the room, and meeting intelligence capabilities. Speaking of intelligent capabilities, coming soon, all Teams Premium participants in a BYOD room can be distinguished and attributed in the transcript and associated to the room that they're in. This dramatically improves transcripts, meeting recaps, and Copilot experiences. With the adoption of flexible work, we've seen many organizations adapt more open work space concepts with bookable desks. But oftentimes when taking calls in meetings there, it can get pretty noisy if you don't have the right equipment. We have millions of users using Teams-certified peripherals daily to do just that. With certified peripherals, you can rest assured that you're getting the best audio and video quality in Teams and benefit from deep integration with Teams via the Teams button. And now I'm thrilled to announce the first native Bluetooth device to be Teams-certified very soon, the Zone Wireless 2. This new headset from Logitech features AI noise suppression and four noise-cancelling mics to reduce background conversations and emphasize the speaker's voice. Best of all, you'll have the option to use it in Teams without a wireless adapter. We will also be enhancing noise suppression for all headset users by the end of this year. This enhanced form of noise suppression can identify near- versus far-field noises, and suppress all noise detected far away from the mic. So you can be heard even more clearly. But for optimal experience, we really recommend using voice isolation, which filters voices that don't match your voice profile in addition to the background noise. Voice isolation makes it easier to work from anywhere. Let's take a look and see how it works.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you so much [inaudible].
SPEAKER 4: Microsoft Teams voice isolation distinguishes your voice from others so you're heard clearly in calls and meetings.
SPEAKER 3: They're looking really great. I'm looking forward to sharing this with our leaders.
SPEAKER 4: Be heard anywhere with voice isolation in Microsoft Teams.
[MUSIC]
SANDHYA RAO: I'm happy to announce voice isolation is now available in more languages and on Mac OS. And when you enroll your voice, we have more language options as well. We're also making voice enrollment even easier, because early next year, we're setting enrollment policies to on by default, providing end users easier access to these productivity enhancements. To learn more and get started, check out some of the resources available now.
Next up, Wendy's going to take us through some of the latest and greatest updates for Teams Phone. Take it away, Wendy.
WENDY ARNETT: Thank you, Sandhya. Teams is now the undisputed leader in cloud calling, with more than 20 million Teams Phone-enabled users and continuing to grow. This fall, we were once again named a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for UCaaS. This is the sixth year we've received this recognition, and we're thrilled to be positioned highest in the ability to execute and furthest on the completeness of vision axes. We're extremely pleased with the vision, functionality, and ability to execute. And today we'll be talking about just a few new enhancements coming soon to Teams Phone. As more customers standardize on Teams Phone, we're increasing capabilities to enable intelligent customer engagement experiences. Here you can see the new Queues app, which gives teams a centralized place to manage customer calls in Teams. In this instance, queue wait times have increased to 17 minutes. Fortunately, with the new call back for call queues feature, your customers no longer have to wait on the line for assistance. Instead, they can request a call back when someone is available to help. This way, they can feel confident that they will receive a phone call as soon as help is available, and be immediately connected to the right person. We're also enabling in-app extensibility for PSTN calls. This platform investment allows third-party developers to extend the client experience in Teams with contextual information, making it possible for Teams users to have access to relevant data without leaving the call experience. Imagine customer-facing staff having access to CRM information, case management information, or any additional data from line-of-business applications related to the calling customer immediately at their fingertips. This brings additional context and workflow integration into telephony experiences and makes customer-facing professionals more efficient. The platform components that support this functionality are ready for developers to add new functionality to calls and we're looking forward to seeing how our partner ISVs use it to help people be even more effective with Teams Phone. For users with shared called responsibilities, delayed simultaneous ring will alert the intended recipient first, instead of notifying everyone the moment a call comes in. This helps reduce noise and minimizes distractions, especially for roles like delegates and customer service teams. It keeps employees focused and ensures efficient call-handling, enhancing both collaboration and customer experience. This feature will be easily configurable directly in your settings in the Teams app. To simplify the management of Teams Phone, we're introducing support for administrative units, and role-based admin controls. For the first time, Teams administrators can delegate the management of calling functionality to local administrators who are responsible for managing voice deployment and policy for a defined group of employees. This will allow departmental or regional administrators to make the changes that are right for their teams or region without the need for centralized administrators to be involved. Calling relies upon trust. For those most important calls, Survivable Branch Appliance enables users to continue placing and receiving PSTN calls in the event of a network outage. Survivable Branch Appliance relies on authentication tokens that are renewed daily for users to stay connected. With the upcoming release, Survivable Branch Appliance will be able to use expired authentication tokens for up to seven days, allowing users to maintain calling connectivity for an extended period of time during an outage. Check with your session border control or vendor to know exactly when this functionality will be available.
Let's talk about some of the coming innovations for Teams Phone devices. Teams Phones devices delivers reliable and high-quality calling and meeting experiences through deep partnerships with leading OEMs. We continue to deliver great value to our customers with key investments centered around core and advanced calling, intelligence, and device management. Each of these areas plays a crucial role in enhancing the overall user experience and ensuring that our devices meet the highest standards of performance and reliability. Earlier I shared some of the new capabilities we're launching to help you manage customer calls in Teams. We're excited to share that the Queues app will be available soon on phone devices. This experience will help agents manage customer interactions efficiently, directly from their Teams Phone device. Agents will be able to opt in or opt out of queues and access call history, which includes details like customer names, phone numbers, call times, and actions taken during the call. This ensures agents have all the information they need at their fingertips, making it easier to provide personalized and effective customer service. We are also excited to bring you speed dial support on line keys, which is designed to enhance the client experience for high call volume users by allowing quick access to their most frequently dialed contacts. Whether you're in a busy office environment, or multitasking across a variety of activities, having speed dial options readily available on your phone's line keys can greatly improve productivity.
As you can see, we are deeply committed to continued innovation in Teams. Innovation that meets the communication and collaboration needs of users and administrators in this era of hybrid work and AI. Of course, this session only covered a portion of Teams' innovation announced here at Ignite. If you haven't already, please be sure to watch "Unlock the Value of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio," and "Unlock Smart Collaboration with Microsoft Teams" for more information on the AI-powered innovations coming to Teams. Thank you for your time today, and for your interest in Teams. Your feedback, ideas, and collaboration continually inspire us to raise the bar and shape Teams to better serve you.