The Microsoft 365 suite of products got plenty of updates in September, as Microsoft has highlighted not once, but twice in the past week. But there's even more, as a separate forum post has been published, going over the new features in Microsoft Teams in September.
One of the new features is channel cross-posting, that is, the ability to post a message to multiple channels at once. The feature was first announced back in July, and it also supports editing, so if you edit a cross-posted message, it'll be updated on all the channels you sent it to.
Microsoft has also made improvements to chat filtering, with the ability to search for a person's name so you can find every group, meeting, or one-on-one chat you share with them, or keywords to find channels and groups by name. You can also filter for unread messages, for example.
Additionally, you can now turn off notifications for conversations in channels, just as in chats. You can also enable notifications for a specific conversation within a channel, even if that channel is hidden. That way, you'll only get notified for new activity in that specific conversation, rather than the whole channel.
Calls in Teams have received a few updates, too, starting with support for calls in Chrome. There's a new Secondary Ringer feature, so users wearing headsets can still hear calls ring on their computer. Teams will also make it easier to identify who's calling, even if they're not a Teams user, thanks to reverse number lookup for PSTN numbers.
Cloud voicemail has received a few improvements as well, such as the ability to transfer a call directly to Cloud Voicemail. Users can now configure a variety of settings, including call answer rules, greeting language, set up the "out of office" greeting, and customizing the text-to-speech engine for both regular and out-of-office greetings.
Rounding up the calling improvements, Government Cloud Community (GCC) users are getting a handful of improvements for the Phone System as well. These include improved call handling, better Teams calling for VOIP users, Group Call Pickup, phone number blocking, and more.
Finally, for meetings, there are a few new options. It's now possible to start a meeting immediately without prior scheduling, and if you miss a meeting notification, it will now be shown in your activity feed. If the meeting is still ongoing when you see the notification, it's possible to join directly from there. When you're in a meeting, it's now possible to pin users to a specific position on the screen, as opposed to the default layout that prioritizes the most active users. Pinning meeting members only affects the user, and no one else will see the layout changes.
And for users who may be stuck with browsers that don't typically support Teams meetings, Microsoft has developed a lightweight version of the meeting join experience. Those using Internet Explorer 11, Safari, or Firefox, can now join meetings, though meeting organizers will need to set up Audio Conferencing so those users are supported.
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