What you need to know
- Microsoft announced several new features for Teams at Inspire 2022.
- Excel Live, Video Clip, and collaborative annotations will all improve the sharing experience on the communication platform.
- Microsoft also announced Viva Engage, which is a new app that helps build connections and grow communities.
Microsoft Inspire is this week. While it is one of the tech giant’s largest partner events of the year, it generally isn’t a hotspot for consumer news. That being said, there are some noteworthy announcements from Inspire 2022, especially for those that collaborate through Teams.
Excel Live will let people collaborate within workbooks in real-time during Teams meetings. The new feature follows Microsoft’s announcement of Live Share in Teams that the company unveiled at Build this year. Developers and organizations can create similar experiences for Live Share using new extensions within the Teams SDK.
Video Clip is another new Teams feature. It allows users to record, send, and view short videos through chats.
Microsoft also announced a collaborative annotations feature that people can use to mark up content during meetings. People can draw, type, and react to shared content in real-time using tools from Microsoft Whiteboard.
In addition to these newly announced features, Microsoft announced that Teams Connect Shared Channels are generally available. These allow people inside and outside of an organization to work together within a shared space. They support chats, meetings, sharing, co-authoring files, and developing apps together.
Microsoft unveiled new features for Viva at Inspire 2022 as well. Viva Engage is a new app designed to help build communities and to create connections. The platform will deliver a similar experience to social networking but at the workplace, according to Microsoft. Viva Engage will support Storyline and Stories, which seem to be similar to the timeline and story features of several popular social media sites.
In other Viva news, Viva Goals will be generally available on August 1, 2022.
