What’s New in Microsoft Teams - October 2024

In today’s hybrid work environment, seamless communication and collaboration are more important than ever. Microsoft Teams plays a central role in keeping organizations connected, with its powerful calling and meeting room capabilities designed to enhance productivity and streamline workflows.

This blog will keep you up to date on the latest Teams Calling features, best practices for meeting room setups, and insights into how businesses can leverage these tools to improve efficiency. Whether you’re an IT admin optimizing your organization’s call flow, a frontline worker managing high call volumes, or a business leader looking for better collaboration solutions, this series will cover everything you need to stay ahead.

Stay tuned for monthly updates, deep dives into new functionalities, and practical tips to get the most out of Microsoft Teams!

Let’s dive into the key updates and how they can benefit your business!

Chat and Collaboration

Manage your teams and channels easily with the refreshed teams and channels view

This new page view allows you to easily access and manage your teams and channels. Simply click on the ellipsis at the top of your teams list and select “Your teams and channels.” This new hub lists all the teams you are a member of, allowing you to search, triage, and manage them efficiently. Here, you can create a new team, use search and filters like ’teams you own’ or ‘archived teams’ to find what you need, respond to pending channel invites, and utilize the analytics tab to learn about your teams’ engagement. When you select a team, you can view all its associated channels and personalize your workspace by choosing to show only the channels of interest in Teams.

Chat details information pane

Now you can easily get an overview of all of the key details in your 1:1 and group chat with a new information pane. Just click on the ‘open chat details’ button located on the top-right of Teams next to the participant list, to see and access important information about the chat, including participants, shared files, pinned messages and the option to start a search within the chat. With the information pane, you are now able to able to access key chat information without losing sight of activity happening in the chat.

Teams Phone

Queues app for Microsoft Teams

The new Queues app is a solution for collaboratively handling customer calls natively in Teams. Call queue members can easily handle inbound calls without ever leaving Teams, whether the call is made via PSTN or VOIP. Agents and supervisors can make outbound calls on behalf of the call queues or auto attendant that they are assigned to; and they can review the call queue statistics while seamlessly collaborating with their colleagues, all within the flow of work. Members of the queue can easily opt in and out depending on availability and business need.

Supervisors can monitor their call queues and auto attendants in real-time, generate reports on queue and agent performance, and access historical reporting. Call queue and auto attendant configuration is intuitively designed, with admin delegated rights that allow leads to manage members as well as call queue and auto attendant settings, all within Teams.

Additional silent coaching controls such as monitor, whisper, barge and take over will be available post GA. Queues app for Microsoft Teams requires a Teams Premium license and is now generally available.

Teams Rooms and Devices

Find certified for Teams devices for all types of spaces and uses at aka.ms/teamsdevices

Enhanced shared display mode with room audio auto-detect in a BYOD room

For your smallest rooms or when a Teams Rooms is not available, shared display mode in a bring your own device (BYOD) room is automatically activated when you connect your laptop to a room’s audio peripheral via USB. Teams detects the device and recommends joining with room audio on the pre-join screen, streamlining content sharing and enhancing hybrid meetings. On devices already identified by Microsoft as shared devices, users are seamlessly transitioned to the room audio and shared display mode.

Devices certified for Teams

MeetUp 2 for Teams Rooms on Windows (with Lenovo Core)

Newly certified for Teams, Logitech MeetUp 2 is an all-in-one USB conference camera and designed for huddle and small rooms. It brings a simple setup, a selection of AI-enabled audio and video features, and easy management to USB-based deployments with a compute or in BYOD mode. MeetUp 2 can function in USB mode with either an in-room compute or when connected to a laptop in BYOD mode. It is easy to set up in small spaces, thanks to multiple mounting options, clean cabling, and a manual privacy shutter.

Poly Blackwire 8225 Stereo USB-C+A

Stay focused with the Poly Blackwire 8225 headset. The noise-canceling microphone enhanced with Acoustic Fence technology makes sure users sound clear in any environment. And the advanced hybrid active noise canceling (ANC) lets users adjust the setting to fit their environment, so you can enjoy high-quality audio for meetings, calls, and stereo music

Poly Blackwire 3310 Monaural USB-C+A

This intuitive and simple to use headset is built with style and priced for enterprise deployment. It’s comfortable and reliable, with signature audio quality. The monaural over-ear headset includes a boom-arm microphone and convenient controls on the connection wire.