Microsoft Teams gets new feature that will be loved by many

Over a month ago, we talked about how Teams is getting a couple of big upgrades. One of those was video recaps for meetings, which do exactly what you think they do. Now, Microsoft has finally begun rolling out this capability.

Although Teams already allows you to record and transcribe meetings, this alone isn't ideal for a lot of scenarios. For example, if the meeting is very long and contains numerous participants, you'll have a hard time figuring out which part of the meeting was important if you manually scrub through the recording or jump across sections of the transcript.

Video recaps aim to solve exactly this problem, as they'll contain highlights of key moments from the meeting so that important discussion items are surfaced in a digestible format. They will show you slides or screens shared during the meeting, enable you to understand the flow of the conversation, watch important snippets from the meeting, and "get a sense of meeting context and sentiment through narrated visual highlights". If you go to the meeting recap page within Teams, you'll notice a Video recap button that will allow you to trigger this experience.

There are a few known issues, though. Video recaps only work for recorded meetings where the content is between 10 and 90 minutes in length. In addition, if you only transcribe the meeting but don't record it, you won't be able to leverage video recaps. Finally, video recaps take up to 10-15 minutes to show up after the completion of a meeting, which isn't surprising considering that there is obviously some processing time involved.

Right now, this capability is available in Public Preview for Teams, but IT admins should first enable the associated policy that allows tenants to leverage preview features. Meanwhile, to trigger a targeted release, IT admins should define the scope in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Details about general availability are unclear, and Microsoft hasn't noted the license requirements either.