New features in Microsoft Teams for July 2020

With working from home becoming the default during the COVID-19 crisis, Microsoft is continuing to focus on making the Microsoft Teams experience easier and more pleasant.

Participants upped to 300

Soon you’ll find the maximum number of participants in Teams meetings and chats increases from 250 to 300.

If your organisation has any training materials or documentation that reflects the 250 maximum, once this update has been rolled out, you’ll want to update that information.

Channel summaries

Coming in July, you’ll notice a Channel Info icon in the channel header which will open a new Information pane that displays a channel summary.

This will include the channel description, as well as visual indicators for who has recently posted in the channel.

It will also be the new home for any system messages, which we hope will tidy up the General channel where these system messages currently end up.

Any member of a channel will also be able to pin a channel message on the channel Information pane. This will be handy for pinning important messages that will be relevant for people visiting the channel in the future. This feature can be disabled in channel moderation settings if needed.

Suggested replies

Finally, from July, the Microsoft Teams mobile app will feature suggested replies. This will let users pick from three responses for selected messages, such as “Sure”, “OK” and “What time?”.

This handy feature already present in other messaging apps such as WhatsApp. It will help users quickly reply to certain types of messages. It can be disabled at a tenant level, or users can disable the feature themselves if they prefer not to use it.

If you would like to find out more about these changes, or would be interested in help getting more out of Microsoft 365, get in touch with our team.

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