In place of Live Events (which have now been deprecated in Imperial), Microsoft are providing a new feature called Town Halls. This offers many of the features that were available in Live Events, such as anonymous audience viewing and a moderated Q and A using the Teams Q and A feature which has evolved and is available more generally across Teams meetings.
In addition, Microsoft have added a feature to Town Halls which allows additional presenters on the screen – so it is much easier to hold Q and A sessions with multiple presenters at the same time or for multiple speakers to appear on screen together.
To request access to schedule a Town Hall event, you will need to complete a new Town Hall request form. Please only complete this form (https://forms.office.com/e/jdi6yP53EQ) to request Town Hall capabilities if you need to deliver a large-audience meeting with anonymous, unseen audiences.
Webinars – Available NOW
If you want to run a webinar, which is more like a normal Teams meeting but with greater audience control and with a registration form, then please complete the Webinar request form at https://forms.office.com/r/RDq7yw8Vmv
Teams Premium License – Available NOW
We recommend purchasing a Teams Premium license through ICT to gain full functionality, including the advanced features in Town Halls and Webinars.
Teams Premium licenses enable all the registration and communications features in Town Halls and Webinars, and in Webinars, allow for the restriction of numbers and the ability to run a “wait list”.
In addition Teams Premium licenses offer AI meeting notes and tasks features in normal Teams Meetings.
A number of updates and changes have been published by Microsoft over the recent weeks. This blog post provides brief details about the ones that are most impactful for members of Imperial’s community.
Calendar Notifications in Teams Activity Feed
You can now get the Calendar Notifications in Teams from the Activity Feed.
You will get calendar notifications in the Activity Feed for the following scenarios:
Meeting invite (including channel meetings you are explicitly invited to) Meeting updates Meeting cancellations Meeting forwards (as an organizer)
When you get a calendar notification, you will see an unread notification in the Activity Feed pane or at the bell icon.
When you click on a notification, you will see the details of the meeting / event in the right pane.
Tags in Teams Private Channels
If you use tags within a team to associate groups of users, you can now use these tags for @ mentions inside Private channels.
Changes to the Website Tab in Teams
Microsoft Teams will be retiring the ability to load websites inside the new Teams client when using the Website tab. These website links will open in a new browser tab instead. This is to better align with emerging best practices in web security and privacy while also improving the reliability of websites opened through this feature.
Education tenants will be subject to this change but not before July 2024.
At the current time you are urged to plan for this forthcoming change which may not take effect until after summer 2024.
More videos visible in Teams meetings in Chrome and Edge
Microsoft Teams Meetings currently supports a maximum of 4 videos (2×2) on the screen by default (i.e., Gallery view) on web browsers.
With this update, users will be able to automatically see up to 9 videos (3×3) on Chrome and Edge on their screen by default without any additional explicit action.
Emojis, Gifs and Stickers in one unified “picker”
Users can soon find all of their emojis, GIFs, and stickers in a combined picker in Microsoft Teams. This simplifies the experience and will be available by early May 2024 at the latest.
Hide the “general” channel in Teams
Similar to other channels in a team, now you will be able to hide general channels as well! As a team member, when you become a part of a team, you see general channel always shown in your teams and channels list. From April 2024 you will have the option to hide this channel from the list of channels that you see in your default Teams view.
Intelligent recap on iOS and Android
For users with a Teams Premium License (https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/office365/2024/04/29/microsoft-teams-premium-licenses/) Intelligent recap is now available in iOS and Android versions of Teams. Meetings recorded or transcribed and where the organiser has a Teams Premium license will now be delivered with the AI generated meeting notes and actions in the same way as when recorded from a desktop device.
Planner App in Teams
The new Planner App is now available for use in Microsoft Teams. Previously known as “Tasks by To-Do and Planner”, the new Planner App builds on the new releases of functionality in Planner and the new Planner Premium features.
Microsoft assure us that Planner Premium licenses will be available for Education tenants such as ours to purchase in due course. If you wish to use Planner Premium features immediately then you should contact the Service Desk to purchase a Microsoft Project Plan 3 (Project Pro) license as this enables Planner Premium features today.
Teams meeting recordings will be saved into the Organiser’s OneDrive for Business instead of the person who initiated the recording. Microsoft is making this change for governance and compliance purposes and to ensure a simple and understandable policy for where the recording is stored.
The change will be made by the end of May 2024. After that time all Teams meeting recordings will be stored in the OneDrive for Business of the account that organises the meeting.
Shorter Teams Meeting URLs
Microsoft are changing the format of the URLs for Teams meetings, removing some information and thus reducing the length of the URL. This will make it easier to copy and paste meeting URLs into meetings or chats for quick access.
The change will be rolled out between mid May and late June 2024.
Teams for Web – Safari and Firefox
Up until April 2024 New Teams has only worked in the Chrome and Edge web browsers on Windows, macOS and Linux.
With immediate effect, New Teams for Web on Firefox is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. New Teams for Web on Safari is now available now on macOS
Media node in OneDrive for Business
Microsoft will be adding a Media node to the left navigation bar of Microsoft OneDrive for web that will allow customers to easily find all the photo and video content stored in their OneDrive in a single view.
When an end user navigates to the Media node, they will see a view of all the photo and video content stored within their OneDrive.
This content will be sorted by the date the content was created. The files shown in this view are the same files stored in the user’s OneDrive and the Media node does not create separate copies of the content.
End users will be able to perform actions on the media content in this view such as Share, Download, or Delete. These actions will behave the same way in the Media node as they do in the My Files node.
Media node in OneDrive
This feature should be visible by mid May 2024.
Loop components in OneNote
You can create or insert Loop components into your Microsoft OneNote notebook.
Loop component in OneNote for Web
With Loop components in OneNote, users can:
Enhance Collaboration
Bringing unstructured, collaborative content from Loop components in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook into OneNote notebooks, fostering real-time collaboration and sharing.
Improve Productivity: Quickly augment and recall collaborative notes within the familiar workflow of OneNote, enabling tasks to be completed more efficiently.
How to Insert Loop components into OneNote for Web
When using Microsoft Whiteboard, users will be able to @mention other users within their tenant inside of a comment.
The flow will look and feel similar to other Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The user will type an @ symbol followed by the name of the user they would like to @mention in the text of a comment.
If the @mentioned user is not actively using Whiteboard then they will be sent a notification via email and via the Microsoft Outlook notification bell. Inside of Whiteboard, the @mentioned user will see a blue @mention badge on the comment in which they are mentioned.
Additional things to note:
Users will be shown a teaching callout within Whiteboard to inform them of the new @mention feature. Similar to the blue @mention badge, users will see a new red badge on comments that will display the number of replies in that comment thread that they have yet to read.
This feature is planned to be available by late May 2024.
Scheduling meetings for others? Want to give someone else control of the meeting?
Set up Co-Organisers to control the meeting and lobby even if you can’t attend.
How?
Schedule your meeting as normal. Ensure that you have invited at least your proposed co-organiser (must be inside the organisation) and any presenters.
Go to Meeting Options
Look for the co-organiser setting and click on the drop down arrow to select the co-organiser.
Save your meeting options.
When will this be available?
Microsoft have started to roll this out and expect it to be fully available by the end of March 2022.
New sessions are now bookable for the following Office 365 courses.
Getting Started with Office 365
This course covers the basics of Office 365 to help you get started and be confident using One Drive for Business, Office Online and to work with colleagues on shared documents.
Running at 10am on the following dates:
6 December 2021
5 January 2022
3 February 2022
1 March 2022
7 April 2022
3 May 2022
8 June 2022
4 July 2022
Do you want to know how to do more with Microsoft Teams, collaborating with your colleagues, working in a single multifaceted workspace? Come and find out how to do more with Microsoft Teams.
Running on the following dates (usually at 2pm):
6 December 2021
5 January 2022
3 February 2022
3 March 2022 (10am)
7 April 2022
5 May 2022 (10am)
8 June 2022
4 July 2022
Join the OneNote training to find out how you can replace the paper notebooks, search for content and use the “swiss army knife” app that is included in your Office 365 subscription. In addition to looking at personal Notebooks, the course touches on the use of Class and Staff notebooks for teaching and management purposes.
This introductory course will help you get started with Power Automate – understanding the basics and how to build automation for personal productivity. Automation can help with saving time and reducing errors by removing the human element from repetitive task processing. Build it once, reuse the process time and time again in a repeatable method.
With continued remote and hybrid working, Microsoft have introduced new methods for sharing content into meetings in Microsoft Teams.
These new features are rolling out now and should be fully available by mid October 2021 at the latest.
You can now share content from an additional camera – so if you have a plug in USB web cam you can use it as an alternate visualiser to deliver details from a document into a meeting. Clearly for best results you will want to find a means to ensure that the camera is held at a steady and regular position – so mounting using a clip or bulldog clip will keep a fixed position for the camera.
You can also use the build in webcam on a laptop to project a physical whiteboard into the meeting.
To enable and use these features go to the share option in your Teams meeting …
Select “Content from camera” …
Then choose what you want to present into the meeting …
Two new modes for presenting content and video into a Microsoft Teams meeting will be introduced during late August and early September.
What is available?
Side by side mode – allows the video of the presenter alongside the content being delivered – similar to the effect that has been available in a live event.
Reporter mode – superimposes the content over the shoulder of the presenter’s video in a similar fashion to that of a newsreader in a broadcast.
Meeting presenters:
Can customize the background image before starting the presentation
Can easily enable or disable the video feed during the presentation from the sharing bar
Timing
These new presentation features are rolling out now and will be available to users by mid September ’21 at the latest.
