📢 Microsoft details new features introduced in Teams with January 2021 update (Approvals, Offline messaging, Meeting chat moderation settings and more)

Microsoft Teams is the hub for your team to communicate through chats, meetings, and content sharing within your organization. It was initially released in 2017, and then became one of the popular communication media in organizations during the COVID19 pandemic.

Microsoft regularly updates Teams with new features and improvements that made it strong among all other platforms. Now the company detailed all the new features introduced in January 2021 update. Continue reading to know more.

In the Chat & Collaboration category, the first feature is to create an organization-wide team to promote collaboration and communications across the entire organization. Administrators who manage tenants that have less than or equal to 10,000 members can now create an org-wide team, which automatically syncs all the tenant's members with the team.

As the second feature in this category, Microsoft adds an approval request app to Teams. With this feature, you can now quickly start an approval process directly from chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app itself. You can use this feature as a central hub managing all your business approvals, like project proposals, client agreements, resource allocations, etc.

Also Read:

• How to create an approval request in Microsoft Teams?
• How to approve or reject an approval request in Microsoft Teams?

The third feature in this category is allowing you to send messages even when you are offline. This will help you to reply to messages when you have poor connectivity. The queued message will be delivered to recipients when you appear online.

The company said that the queued message will be sent once there is a network connection. But, if Microsoft Teams fails to send the message within 24 hours due to no internet connectivity, the user will be prompted to resend the message or delete it.

In the Meetings category, Microsoft adds chat moderation settings to Teams. To help create a safe and inclusive meeting environment, the meeting organizers and teachers can now choose from three chat settings ("Disabled", "Only during the meeting", and "Enabled").

With these settings, you can now prevent the organizer and participants from using the meeting chat. You can also allow participants to send messages only during the meeting and the organizer to send messages at any time. When disallowing configuration is not needed, you can allow chats for all meeting attendees at any time.

The second feature in this category is to allow you to create and share a calendar with members of a specific channel. Microsoft Teams will automatically create a new post in the channel's activity feed once you create a channel meeting. Once a channel event is posted, you can add it to your personal calendar.

As the third feature in this category, you can now join Microsoft Teams meetings with a global dial-in number from any mobile device. You can also dial out to help others join a meeting with Audio Conferencing.

Apart from these, Microsoft adds new devices to support all types of Teams services. These include Logitech Rally Bar, Creston Flex Mercury Mini, Yealink A30, AudioCodes RXV80, EPOS Expand 80T, Nureva HDL300, Poly Sync 40, Video Conferencing Monitors by Dell, Phones from Yealink MP 54 & Audiocodes C470HD, Sidecars from Audiocodes and Yealink EXP50.