March was a quieter month for Teams Calling, Meetings, and Devices compared to the Copilot side of the house, but there are a few changes worth planning around, especially the VDI retirement notice, which has a hard deadline attached. Here’s what shipped, what’s rolling out, and what to keep an eye on.
Teams Phone
- Copilot in Teams Phone live calls, now powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. The Copilot experience during Teams Phone calls has been unified with Copilot Chat, so it works consistently across desktop and mobile. During a live call you can generate summaries and surface key insights in real time, and it pulls in Work IQ context (emails, meetings, files) for more relevant responses. Launched.
Teams Meetings, Webinars & Premium
- Annotations on single shared window. When sharing a single application window instead of your whole desktop, participants can now annotate directly on it. This is the privacy-conscious option, you get real-time markup and collaboration without exposing the rest of your desktop. Works across Windows, macOS, and mobile. Rolling out.
- Audio recap, expanded language support. Audio recap now supports seven additional languages (Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish) alongside English, making it easier for global teams to catch up on meetings. Rolled out in March.
- Live meeting indicator for threaded channels. Threaded channels now show a live indicator when a meeting is active, so members can spot and join in-progress meetings without needing a separate invite. Rolling out.
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)
If your organization runs Teams inside VDI, this section matters more than the rest combined:
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Customize your video feed in Teams meetings (VDI). Background blur, virtual backgrounds, and custom background images are now supported in VDI, bringing feature parity with the native desktop client.
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New VDI solution for Teams optimization in Amazon WorkSpaces. A new architecture offloads audio, video, and screen sharing to the user’s device via the SlimCore media engine, delivering a high-definition experience. Supported on WorkSpaces Personal and Pooled with the WorkSpaces Client for Windows, AppStream is not supported. Launched.
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Public preview: new Teams VDI optimization for Omnissa (Horizon). A modern, native-like media engine replacing the legacy WebRTC-based optimization, with faster join times, fewer call drops, better screen sharing, and modern codec support. Rolling out.
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Legacy WebRTC-based VDI optimization is being retired. This is the one to put on your calendar. Microsoft is deprecating WebRTC-based optimization for Windows endpoints on Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, and Citrix due to performance, diagnostics, and scalability limitations.
- End of Support: October 1, 2026
- End of Availability: April 1, 2027, after which the new media-engine architecture is enforced.
If you’re on VDI today, start testing the new media engine now rather than waiting for the forced cutover, the new architecture decouples the media engine from the virtual desktop image, which should mean fewer rebuilds and version mismatches going forward, but it’s still a migration.
Workplace: Microsoft Places and Teams Rooms
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Voice and face profile enrollment dashboard for admins. A centralized dashboard in the Teams Admin Center gives visibility into voice and facial profile enrollment across the org, useful for understanding readiness for AI-enhanced meeting features before you turn them on broadly. Generally available.
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Teams shared display mode and peripheral detection for GCC-H. Shared display mode, hosting a meeting privately from a personal PC on a shared display, is now available in GCC-H environments, along with peripheral detection for BYOD spaces and device inventory management through the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. Rolling out.
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Licensing updates expand access to Places and Teams (effective April 1, 2026):
- Places Finder and Places Explorer become available to all licenses with Outlook/Teams calendars.
- A new Teams Shared Space license adds desk booking, space management, and analytics for up to four desks per license.
- Teams Enterprise users get expanded town hall and webinar capacity, up to 3,000 attendees (10,000 view-only).
- Add-on attendee packs scale event capacity up to 100,000 attendees.
If you’ve been holding off on Places because of licensing gaps, this is worth revisiting from April 1 onward.
Certified for Teams devices
A handful of new hardware got Teams certification this cycle:
- Yealink MP55 E2, Teams desk phone running MDEP and Android 15, with Optima HD Voice, AI noise cancellation, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/USB headset support.
- Owl Labs HP Poly & Owl Labs Small Teams Rooms Bundle (Owl 3 or Owl 4+), the Poly Studio Base Kit G9 Plus paired with an HP Mini IP Conferencing PC (13th Gen i7, 16GB RAM) and an AI-tracking Meeting Owl camera; the Owl 4+ variant adds 4K video.
- Huddly C1, AI-powered videobar for small-to-medium rooms with on-device AI framing, an AI-driven mic array, and next-gen Huddly Intelligence for up to 20x more on-device AI processing.
- Neat Center camera, a 360° companion device that extends visibility to in-room participants who are far from or facing away from the primary Teams Room device.
Teams device software updates
- Teams Rooms on Android, 1449/1.0.96.2026048906 (April 2026): fixes an issue where content sharing intermittently stopped in meetings on dual-display Android room devices.
- Teams phones, 1449/1.0.94.2026044404, March 24, 2026 (Poly, Yealink, AudioCodes):
- Safe Transfer: if a transferred call isn’t answered, Teams now rings the original caller back instead of dropping them into voicemail, toggle it on/off per call.
- Admin Override for line keys is now on by default on personal phones, giving admins consistent control over line key configuration without per-device setup.
- Several bug fixes: rejected transfers no longer show “Transfer successful,” the Transfer button no longer greys out for accounts with search disabled, shared line contacts now update correctly with profile templates, and the missing “Leave Voicemail” button in contact/call log menus is fixed.
What’s coming next
A few items already visible on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap worth watching:
- In development: Queues app on Teams mobile, Attendant Agent, AI-generated meeting archive, sharing recap access, breakout room bulk-add via CSV, Entra passwordless resource accounts for Teams Rooms on Windows, digital signage for Teams panels.
- Rolling out soon: attendee capacity packs for Teams events, automatic spoken language detection, video recap in Teams.
Why this matters
Nothing here is flashy, but the VDI retirement deadline is the item to act on now rather than later, October 2026 for end of support isn’t far off if you’re running a large virtual desktop estate. Everything else (annotations, audio recap languages, the Places licensing changes) is low-effort, high-value stuff you can just let roll out.