Everything new that rolled out to Microsoft Teams in May 2021

Microsoft Teams gains new features every month, and we stay on top of them as they roll out in preview and to the general public. But with so many capabilities coming to Teams, it’s easy to miss something. Each month, Microsoft gathers everything new for Teams from the month into a comprehensive post. We’ve listed everything here and highlight the biggest ones.

Meetings and webinars

This category may be the one that general users care about the most. Meetings and webinars gained several features in May, including support for Dynamic view and Presenter mode. Dynamic view has Teams automatically change what appears on your screen, making the meeting show content that makes sense. Presenter mode only supports Standout mode right now, but Reporter and side-by-side mode are on the way.

Another handy improvement is the improved sharing experience. Before, when you went to share your screen or other content with a meeting, you saw a crowded menu of all your apps and displays. Now, your windows are gathered together in a convenient bucket you can rotate through.

Here’s the full list of what’s new for meetings and webinars:

• Dynamic view
• Presenter mode
• Large meeting support
• Custom attendee registration
• Improved experience for sharing content in a meeting
• Include computer sound when sharing on Mac
• Breakout room timer
• Edge and Chrome browser meeting updates
• Updated settings for attendees video
• AI-based noise suppression for Mac users
• Improved participant list
• Search in meeting participant list
• New Teams Live Events eCDN – Ramp
• Intelligent Question Suggestions for Polls in Teams meeting
• Multiple Choice Quiz option for Microsoft Forms Poll in Teams Meetings
• Block Downloads for non-channel Teams meeting recordings on OneDrive

Calling

The calling experience within Teams got refreshed this month. It’s been streamlined to show contacts, voicemail, and call history together. Teams also gained the ability to merge calls this month, which lets you merge active one-to-one calls together or have a one-to-one call join a group.

Here’s everything else that rolled out for calling in Teams:

• New Calling Experiences
• Call Merge
• Microsoft Calling Plan expansion
• Branch Office Survivability on Teams phones

Devices

Sharing content from your mobile phone to Teams devices got easier this month. You can now cast content from your phone to a Teams Room running on Windows. There are also several new Teams devices available:

• Teams casting with Mobile Phone for Microsoft Teams Rooms
• Newly certified devices
• Crestron Flex Microsoft Teams Rooms
• Poly Voyager Focus 2
• Yealink MVC840

Chat and collaboration

The biggest change to chatting in Teams this month is the added option to chat with up to 250 participants across multiple organizations within a single chat. This should make it much easier to work together with external partners.

Microsoft also rolled out some other handy features:

• Group chat with external users
• Microsoft Viva Insights
• Adobe Sign Integration in Approvals App

Power Platform, Security, compliance, and privacy

Admins and IT professionals have some new capabilities that improve the security and management of Teams. One of the biggest additions is the ability for admins to install Apps in Meetings.

• Updates to Dataverse for Teams administration
• Microsoft 365 Customer Key now supports Teams
• Admins can install Apps in Meetings

Teams for Education

The ability to add assignments to the Office 365 calendar within Teams is a welcome addition to the platform. It makes it easy to keep track of due dates and all the assignments coming up.

Here’s everything else that’s new for education:

• Supervised chat
• Career Coach – Microsoft Teams for Education app powered by LinkedIn
• Add assignments to Office 365 calendar

Frontline Workers

Frontline workers gained a couple of capabilities for Teams this month. Most notably, Tag APIs make it easy to quickly reach people based on role. The APIs let you programmatically create and manage tags in a team.

• Tag APIs
• Manage retail frontline tasks with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce and Teams

Government

Source: Windows Central

As is normally the case, there are new features for several government clients of Teams that were already available for the commercial consumer version of Teams. These features are rolling out to the US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and United States Department of Defense (DoD).

• Breakout room timer
• Polls in Teams Meetings
• Updates to Data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft Teams
• Team templates