In This Week in Teams, Craig and Jay started out talking about Craig’s meeting scheduling habit of 45 minutes versus 1 hour minute meetings. He schedules them to start 5 minutes after the hour and goes to 10 minutes before the hour (11:05 am – 11:50 am). He says the first 5 minutes are always spent waiting for everyone and his customers appreciate the 10 minute break before their next meetings. They then talked about MS Ignite and how Jay felt underwhelmed by the announcements compared to past Ignites while Craig added that he didn’t have time to spend on it virtually and would much rather preferred to be in person.

Jay & Craig discuss Ignite, but not at the depth a conference of this degree deserves. Check out some of these recommended reviews for fuller details:

• The Microsoft Ignite Book of News is a guide to all the announcements made with all the detail you need.
• The MS Refresh Show with Matt Wade and Sean Bugler dives deep into the latest feature announcements.
• MVPs Lisa Crosbie and Elaiza Benitez cover everything from keynotes to Power Platform updates

After the normal chit chat, they then got into the real purpose of this episode, discussing the November 2021 Microsoft Teams product blog which covers the latest and greatest news and announcement for the month.

First off we talked about Jay’s sweet spot, Government and covered:

• Presenter Mode in Desktop & Window Sharing available in GCC-High and DOD
  • Last month into GCC
• New Assignment Experience for Breakout rooms in GCC-H and DOD
• Attendance Report in GCC
• Isolated Audio Feeds in GCC
• 25k Members per Team in GCC-H (yes, Jay misspoke and said 25 members per team, but clearly meant 25,000. Thousand – haha.

After that they moved on to talk about Meetings and Calling

• Communication Access Realtime Translation for Live Captions (new format of captioning)
  • ALSO Available in GCC
• Content from Camera <– ok this is really slick
• Anonymous User Join Policies (also in GCC)
• Custom hold music – only 1 song???

Then Jay wanted to talk about search

• Lost is the ability to search within the subject line, hoping that comes back <– A huge loss for Jay, Craig not so much
• Gained is an AI based Top Hits
• New search results page <– actually is nicer, minus the lost search in subject field

Finally they got to big announcement of the evolution of the the Fluid Framework into a new product called Microsoft Loop.

• Built on Fluid Framework (first announced in May 2019)
• Composed of Components, Pages, and Workspaces
• Loop Pages sound like OneNote pages on growth hormones
• Can’t wait for Build next year where they get into how developers can use components in their apps
• Rolling out NOW to MSFT Teams Chat
  • Co-author
  • Status report
  • Topic gathering
  • Check out “Live components” in teams today, if it’s rolled out to your tenant yet
• Interesting note in the rollout is that every loop component is backed by a file in your OneDrive, there was discussion of what this would look like and will be an upcoming episode on Loop in more detail.

Lastly, they closed out discussing their upcoming appearance at 365 EduCon – DC and wishing you and your a great holiday season.

The post #OTSTWIT What’s New in Teams? November 2021 Edition – Episode 39 first appeared on On The Spot Network.