Month: February 2024

Retirement of Teams Live Events

In September 2024 Microsoft will turn off Live Events in Microsoft Teams. This will affect any users who have had access to Public facing Live Events.

What Now?

A new feature, called Microsoft Town Halls is being rolled out with greater capabilities than Live Events.

Town Halls feature a “green room” for pre-event preparation and bringing speakers together.

Town Halls also offer the ability to bring multiple speakers into view along with content such as presentations of screen shares or for panel style sessions with multiple speakers (up to 7 in view at any one time) – something that was difficult with Live Events.

Town Halls also offer the ability to send integrated emails for attendees – so no copying and pasting the attendee link into a separate calendar invitation in the future. Emails may also be customised further when the organiser has a Teams Premium license.

Live Events switch-off

Live Events capability will be switched off on the 31 July 2024. Staff who have Public Facing Live Event capabilities will be contacted in the coming weeks to discuss current and anticipated requirements going forwards.

New Town Hall users

ICT will shortly publish a new request form for Town Hall capabilities. Staff who wish to use Town Hall features will need to apply for this capability at least one month in advance of their planned event to ensure time for the College events team to review the request and for capabilities to be enabled, rehearsals held, etc.

Find Out More

You can find out more about Town Halls and the feature set at the following Microsoft pages – Introducing Town Halls in Microsoft Teams and Retiring Microsoft Teams Live Events – Microsoft Community Hub

Updating to the New Teams Application

What’s Happening?

In summer 2023, Microsoft made the new Teams application available for Windows and then Mac OS X systems in preview. As a result of the extensive use and testing and in order to move forwards with new features, Microsoft will be ending the Classic Teams application on Windows and Mac OS from 31 March 2024.

In advance of this enforced change, ICT will be updating the policy for all College users to use the New Teams application.

This change is planned for 27 February 2024 and will install the new Teams application at the next initiation of the application if you haven’t already switched over manually by 27 Feb.

Why the New Teams Application?

The classic Teams application has been in use for almost 6 years and can hog memory and processor resources making it unreliable on lower specification devices. Since the first iteration many new features have been added creating divisions in the application and it’s effectiveness.

The new version consolidates the changes into an improved application which uses much less computer resources, resulting in greater availability for other applications. Improvements in the underlying code also mean that the New Teams app is faster and more responsive.

What About Known Issues?

Microsoft maintain a list of known features for the New Teams application at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoftteams/new-teams-known-issues.

The main one that may affect a small number of users is the ability to produce Live Events in the New Teams application. An update is being released to allow this and will be available at the point when we change, or shortly after. For anyone who needs to produce a live event you will be able to switch back tot he old version of Teams to produce your event. Note that presenters will be able to use the New Teams application in a Live Event.

Microsoft 365 Feature Updates

The following are updates of particular interest or use for staff and students within College. Many have been demonstrated or discussed at the regular Microsoft 365 Ask Me Anything sessions (find out more at Ask Me Anything Sessions for the 2023 / 24 Academic Year – Office 365 News and Updates (imperial.ac.uk)).

Microsoft Teams Updates


Private Channels – Tags and Channel Links

Private channels will support the use of tags that are generally available in MS Teams. You can use Tags for grouping people with similar responsibilities, grouping students into learning sets or dividing a large team into smaller sub teams for notifications, etc.

By the end of March 2024 you will also be able to create a link to the private channel(s) in your team. You can then use the link to direct people to the correct channel – as long as they are a member or owner in the private channel concerned.

Archiving of Team Channels

From end of February, Channel owners and teams admins will be able to archive a channel in a Team, making it read only for all. This will help people with using only the active channels while leaving information in the archived channels for cross-reference purposes.

Website tab in Teams

From April 2024, the website tab will cease to function. This change is being deployed by Microsoft to ensure security and privacy while improving the reliability of access to websites.

You will only be able to choose to open the website from the tab once the change has been applied.

Unification of Emojis, GIFs and Stickers in one picker

From the end of March 2024 you’ll find a single “picker” to choose emojis, GIFs and stickers. This simplifies the experience for all users and should be easier to use going forwards.

New Gallery view in Meetings

From March 2024 you will find a new Gallery experience and will be able to choose from 4, 9, 16 or 49 attendees per page.

At the same time both video and audio only meeting attendees will appear in a single sized window for easier identification of who is speaking and for spotlighting, etc.

Hide General Channel in Teams

From late March 2024 users will be able to hide the General channel in teams.

The General channel is always created when a new team is provisioned and by default is always visible for users added to the team.

Now users will be able to turn off / hide the General channel to allow focus on specific channels in the Team.

Team owners (admins) can always set the General channel to only allow owners to post in the General channel thus giving a clear admin announcements channel that doesn’t get cluttered with messages and chats that should be in appropriate channels.

Recap Tab

The Recording and Transcription tab for meetings will be replaced with a tab titled Recap.

The recap tab will contain the meeting recording with “in live viewing possible” along with a copy of the transcript.

Users with Teams Premium licenses will also find the AI generated meeting notes and actions in the Recap tab.