This is a May 2018 update on the added features and known issues with Microsoft Teams.

What’s New

The original list (shown in italics) came from the Microsoft TechCommunity (link), I have added my comments on the usefulness I have found so far with these.

Send a message from the command box. You can now send a chat message directly from the command box without leaving the page you’re on. Simply type the @ symbol and someone’s name into the command box at the top of your screen and type your message to start a chat conversation. 

I have found this simple to use.  Your conversation stays within the Team you are in and as soon as you type ‘@’ a pop provides you a recommended individual to chat with.  As you type letters members of the team that match those letters, pop up as you type.  So, this feature is limited to chatting with members of the team you are sitting in.

Send a chat from a contact card. Another easy way to relay a message is to hover over someone’s profile picture to send a quick chat right from their contact card. This makes it simple to switch from an open channel conversation to a private chat with someone.

If you have the contacts set up correctly, when you hover over their image, you can see all of their contact information and reach out to them in various ways, such as chat, email, video call and phone call. You can also view their organization.  Now they added a chat feature directly in this same box, where you use to have to click the chat icon to open a new window to chat.  This is a nicely added useful feature.

Dial out of (or into) a group call. Add someone from outside of your organization into a group call in Teams by dialing their number. You’ve also got the option of distributing a dial-in phone number so anyone outside of your organization can join. Remember, this feature is only available in group calls right now.

Get a reminder that your team is expiring. You can now renew your team (and the underlying Office 365 group) directly from Teams. If your team is set to expire within the next 30 days, you will see a notification. You can then extend the life of your team by visiting ‘Settings’. Here, you can also proactively renew your team before the 30-day notice, (which can be especially helpful if you are leaving for a long vacation for example). (Please note that this feature is only available to AAD premium members and a notification will only show if your IT admin has set an expiration date for teams in your organization). 

This is useful to those members within the team.  I love the ability to administer expirations on these teams in an effort to keep things mangeable and adding these abilities allows members of a team to quickly provide notice that they are still using these team spaces and resources.  If you would like to read more on the expiration policy click this link.

Auto-favorite important channels. Whenever a team owner creates a new team or channel, they can now auto-favorite important channels for the rest of the team. By doing so, the channel will automatically show up in every team member’s favorites making it easy for them to discover and access the new channel. (Team members can of course unfavorite the channel if they want to).

I am not so sure this really useful or well liked by the team members.  Favoriting a team space for the entire team shows value held only in the perspective of the person creating the team.  It may be a good value-add if the entire team plays well together.  I wouldnt use this because I would rather let the members of the team each favorite those team spaces they find most useful at the time.

I will stay test this a little, because the one value I find is that making this a favorite for all invited team members may bring more attention to the team being created and added to their list.

New views in Microsoft Planner tab. Planner has made some updates to integrate more seamlessly into Teams. With Schedule view, you can get an overview of upcoming tasks and drag and drop them to set dates. In the Charts view you can stay up to date on the status of your plans. Lastly, with the Filter and Group by options, you can now group tasks by buckets such as “Assigned To”, “Progress”, “Due Date” and “Labels”.

I like seeing new development in Planner.  This is an area I have a lot of interest in both as and IT professional and as a member of the development team of my company (BEC Legal Systems) . As a professional I like using teams as a project management space and adding in milestones, meetings, tasks for the project becomes useful and easily understood by the membes of the team.  I like drag and drop and adding a lot of simplicity to the creation and management of these items in the Planner.  I would love to see tighter integration with my outlook calendar by adding a team calendar to my optional calendars.  This way I can click on or off as needed on my Outlook client on the desktop, mobiledevice, etc.

I dont use the Charts view often, but find that as more development occurs in Planner, this will become the key space to start with in a team.

Increasing their ability to have a Kanban board like view is also a nice in the step in the right direction in developing this module to become a useful project management tool within the team.

These next few added features (relating to SharePoint) are areas I dont use yet within Teams.  I need to expand our testing environment to include building areas in SP up more.  Does anyone reading this post have anything to add on either the usefulness of these features or how they intergration SharePoint into their Teams structure? I have found a link that will provide more information on the SharePoint integration into Teams.

Add SharePoint pages, news articles and lists as unique tabs within channels. You can now use the SharePoint tab to place important pages, news articles and lists as individual tabs in a channel. This allows you to access and fully interact with the dynamic, data-driven pages and news articles and surface them right in the context of your work in Teams. You can fully interact with the content – including filtering and views for lists.

Bring all your SharePoint team news into discussions. After publishing your news articles, you want to keep everyone up-to-date and automatically spark discussions directly in Teams. To enable that, you can now use the SharePoint news connector to have each SharePoint team site news article generate a new discussion thread within a Microsoft Teams channel. To get started, click on “…” right next to a channel, choose “Connectors” and then search for “SharePoint News”.

Announcing the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center. To enable admins to better manage the various aspects of the service, we have started to roll out a new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center. This new experience provides you with a unified experience to manage both Teams and Skype for Business and will also incorporate Call Analytics and the Call Quality Dashboard. In addition to giving you one place to manage all aspects of the service, the portal provides administrators with additional functionality, including new end-to-end insights and the ability to manage Teams settings on a user level. Read the full announcement blog post to learn more.

This is definitely a place to continue monitoring for enhancements.  As they breakdown the Skype server infrastructure and combine it into the Teams world, this area will certanly grow dramatically.  I like the ability to centralize the management of a communication and colaboration platform.  I also appreciate Microsoft’s slow approach to ensure they get it right.  Messing with a voice system is dangerous when it comes to retaining or adding new customers.

New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps

Enhanced Meetings capabilities. There are a couple new features that will enhance your meetings experience. Request a call to your phone from Teams to connect to a meeting and dial into a meeting when you only have a cellular connection. Do more with Calling. Now, easily turn a 1:1 call into a group call, transfer a 1:1 call to someone else, or forward calls.

I love both of these features!  This definitely starts adding competition by Teams with many of the other collaboration platforms.  I am interested to see how transition, if any, is initiated in this space.  Will it cause compeititors in the space to add more of the ‘Teams’ capabilities to their own space? or cause products and companies to merge their efforts? 

Create teams from mobile in Teams EDU. Teachers and students can now create, edit and delete teams on mobile.

Known Issues

As of May 9th, 2018, the information below is a link of all known and reported issues with Microsoft Teams by feature area.  This list came directly from Microsoft (link).

Administration

Apps

Authentication

Browser

Channels

Chat

Client

Environment

Guest Access

Meetings

Mobile

People

Provisioning

Tabs

Teams