Microsoft is always enhancing and updating the Microsoft 365 platform. In this post we will share some recent highlights/changes within Teams, OneDrive, or Office 365 that were introduced in January 2023. Please share with others in your organization by sharing the link to this blog or sharing the text within. You can even cut and paste this information into an email and take any credit! Please let us know if you find this valuable, and what we can do to help you drive further adoption and use of Microsoft 365 in your organization.
Teams
Add someone to a chat with a simple @mention. The workflow is straight forward, simply type the@ symbol followed by a name. Teams will show you the people already in the chat and an option to add someone new.
When you click on ‘Add someone to the chat,’ you will be asked how much chat history to share, just like when you click the ‘View or Add Participants’ button at the top of the screen. Admittedly, this is a small addition, but it provides the ability to add new voices to the conversation in a more natural way.
Delete chats, finally! You can now delete chats, not just chat messages. This feature is available for 1:1, group, and meeting chats, and will work for desktop, web, and mobile. It will delete the chat for you but not for anyone else in the chat. To delete the chat, you click on the three dots that show up when you hover over the chat name and choose ‘delete.’ You are then asked if you really want to delete the chat and warned it only deletes for you.
Also new in Teams are 800 new emojis. These are found by hovering over a message and then clicking the smiley face with the + on it. Just like the ability to respond to a chat or channel message with a Giphy, these new emojis will not really add anything of substance to your message, other than make work more fun. You do not have to use the new emoji set but it might add a smile to the face of someone else so you might as well.
Improved support for Teams Rooms includes enhancements to how the whiteboard works and (finally!) the ability for meeting attendees using room equipment to see chat messages. No more joining on your phone just to see the back-channel messages.
Lastly for Teams, as of December 16th Teams Premium is now available to preview. Premium will not be right for every organization, but for some, it will be incredibly valuable. We will have more information about what organization’s would benefit from Teams Premium in the future.
This isn’t nearly as new as the other items on the list as it was rolled out in August, but it is a personal favorite of many of us. You can now “pop out” shared content in a meeting! This will allow you to put the shared content on one screen and the faces in the meeting on the other, or side by side for those on a single large monitor. This gives you total control over how and where the shared content is displayed for you and can really enrich the meeting experience. We’ll note that the presented of the shared content can’t “pop out” their own content but they can use “presenter mode” to make that shared content “extra fancy.”
Some of us work around the clock, and some of us work with team members in other time zones. Teams now allows you to schedule the delivery of chat messages by right clicking on the send arrow and choosing a date and time so you can respect the “down time” of your co-workers. This feature is not yet available in channel messages.
OneDrive
If your organization uses Sensitivity Labels (and you should!) these will now be shown as part of the sharing dialog helping users know if the item in question should be shared.
Office (Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Outlook)
Excel now supports pictures in cells instead of having them “float” over the sheet.
Excel on the web now has a Suggested Links feature that will suggest new locations to broken links.
Word will now allow you to share a document with Track Changes turned on by default. This gives the author total control over the document and allows robust collaboration.
Word also now allows the creation of tasks in a document by @ mentioning someone in a comment.
There is now “Search the menus” available with a right click in Word or Word for the Web that will allow you to find any menu item by typing it in.
And that concludes our coverage of recent changes in the Microsoft 365 space, specifically within Teams, OneDrive, and Office 365. Next month we will be back with more. Please let us know how we can best help you be successful with Microsoft 365 technologies. See you next month with the next basket of updates!