Microsoft 365 News 04-01-2021: Microsoft Teams Adds Supervised Chat Feature

In Microsoft 365 news this week, the supplier announced the implementation of a Supervised Chat feature for private messaging in Microsoft Teams to help clients address inappropriate messaging behavior. Keep reading for details about new features and updates for Microsoft 365 apps.

New Features

• • Self-service purchasing abilities
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the introduction of new self-service products globally (excluding India): Power BI Premium per user and Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA. Individuals will have the option to obtain subscriptions for these products starting April 19, 2021. Admins have the option to limit these self-service purchasing capabilities now through PowerShell.

• • New Participant roster experience in Teams meetings
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is altering the display of the Participant list in the Lobby, Presenters, Attendees and In meeting participant sections in Teams meetings for the web and desktop versions of the app. Additionally, the supplier is enhancing the participant roster search experience for meeting attendees utilizing the Teams desktop and web apps.

• • Correct Answer choice features for Teams Polls
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is adding Correct Answer choices to Microsoft Forms Polls in Teams meetings. This enhancement is meant to give presenters greater control of the meeting experience.

• • Supervised Chat feature for Teams
    • What’s happening: To help customers address inappropriate behavior, Microsoft is introducing Teams Supervised Chat. This feature stops restricted end users from initiating new private chats without a supervisor present.

• • Support for Voice-Enabled Channels (Collaborative Calling) in Teams desktop client
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced the introduction of a new feature enabling Voice-Enabled Channels (Collaborative Calling) for Teams desktop end users. It will give you the ability to link Teams channels to call queues.

• • Multiple Teams spotlights
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced that Teams meeting organizers and presenters will soon have the ability to spotlight as many as seven participants at once. This feature will be available for the Teams desktop and web apps.

• • Microsoft Whiteboard for Android
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has launched Microsoft Whiteboard for Android in Public preview. It’s now available via the Google Play Store.

• • Electronic signature support in the Teams Approvals app
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced that they are collaborating with partners to add support for electronic signatures in the desktop and web versions of the Microsoft Teams Approvals app.

• • Teams Approvals app templates
    • What’s happening: Team owners and tenant admins will soon be able to utilize out-of-the-box templates to create approval requests in the Teams Approvals app.

• • New top-level menu item in Microsoft Lists
    • What’s happening: Microsoft Lists will soon have a new drop-down menu, Integrate, for features that extend list experiences.

• • Call Merge for Teams
    • What’s happening: This feature will allow end users to merge an active unheld 1:1 call with a group call or another 1:1 call. This capability will be available for Teams VOIP and PSTN calls.

Updated Features

• • Updated: ‘Always record’ recording policy for Teams live events
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to alter the behavior of the ‘Never record’ recording policy.

• • Microsoft 365 compliance center user experience updates
    • What’s happening: To better comply with web content accessibility guidelines, Microsoft is making improvements to the user experience for Core eDiscovery, Advanced eDiscovery and Content search.

• • New languages for threat, profanity and harassment trainable classifiers
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced that threat, profanity and harassment trainable classifiers for machine learning classification provided by Microsoft 365 compliance solutions now support detection for seven new languages in a preview: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese (Simplified).

• • Enhanced attendee audio management in Teams meetings
    • What’s happening: With this update, meeting organizers and presenters will have more flexibility in determining when attendees can utilize their microphone via the attendee audio management capability.

• • Upcoming 2021 release wave 1 automatic update
    • What’s happening: Microsoft plans to enable the 2021 release wave 1 features for customers worldwide starting April 2, 2021. Please see the 2021 Wwve 1 plan for details.

• • More emojis in Teams
    • What’s happening: End users will soon have access to a wider range of emojis in Teams.

• • Updated Teams meeting lobby settings
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is changing the Teams meeting lobby settings so that only organization participants can bypass the lobby.

• • Teams desktop date/time format sync with Mac and Windows OS settings
    • What’s happening: Microsoft is updating the date/time formats for Teams desktop clients so they’ll match Mac and Windows OS regional settings.

Announcements

• • Compliance Manager (classic) retirement
    • What’s happening: Microsoft will soon retire Compliance Manager (classic) from the Microsoft Service Trust Portal. The supplier suggests that clients utilize Compliance Manager in the Microsoft 365 compliance center instead.

• • Retirement of Yammer support for Internet Explorer
    • What’s happening: Yammer and other Microsoft 365 apps and services will retire support for Internet Explorer 11 effective August 2021. The supplier advises that customers utilize the new Microsoft Edge or another modern browser instead.

• • Paused rollout of Planner intelligent file recommendations
    • What’s happening: Microsoft previously announced plans to introduce a feature that would allow end users to add attachments to their tasks from an intelligently assembled file list. Based on learnings from early rings, the supplier has decided to make alterations before proceeding with the implementation of this feature.

• • Microsoft Edge: New options and release cycles
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has decided to implement Chromium’s 4-week major release cadence, beginning with Microsoft Edge major version 94. For customers who prefer a longer timeline, the supplier will also offer an 8-week major release Extended Stable alternative.

• • Move away from UserVoice sites
    • What’s happening: Microsoft has announced plans to move away from UserVoice feedback sites during 2021 product-by-product. The supplier has leveraged their partnership with UserVoice to get feedback from customers but is now switching to first-party solutions.

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