Microsoft’s new enhancements to Teams meetings

Using the ‘virtual breakout rooms’ feature, meeting organisers will be able to split meeting participants into sub-groups to enable discussions.

Microsoft’s new enhancements to Teams meetings. | Picture by special arrangement.

(Subscribe to our Today's Cache newsletter for a quick snapshot of top 5 tech stories. Click here to subscribe for free.)

Microsoft has introduced a new set of features to improve the meeting experience for users on the Teams platform.

Using the ‘virtual breakout rooms’ feature, meeting organisers will be able to split meeting participants into sub-groups to enable discussions. Organisers can create up to 50 breakout rooms in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, with participants either manually or automatically assigned to the sub-groups.

The participants can re-join the larger group meeting at any moment, and the files from the breakout rooms can be accessed in the main meeting as well. The feature has started rolling out and will be available to Government Community Cloud customers first, Microsoft noted in a blog post.

Teams users will now get a notification when a scheduled meeting’s time is coming to an end. The notification will appear on screen when there are five minutes remaining in the meeting, and will disappear after 10 seconds. It just alerts the users and does not terminate the meeting automatically.

In addition, a simplified pre-meeting audio, video, and device configuration interface makes it easier for participants to join a meeting.

The software giant said it has extended the limit increases for live events until June 30. This includes event support for up to 20,000 participants , hosting 50 events simultaneously, and event duration of 16 hours per broadcast.

The company also expanded the language support for real-time translation in live events. The new languages include Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian. These languages can be translated into 50 different languages, it noted.

Further, live captions support has been extended to one-to-one calls, making it easier for users to follow a conversation. Plus, users can now conveniently access multiple numbers for a contact when initiating an audio or video call, by clicking on a split button in the chat header.

In December last year, the tech giant had announced a number of new enhancements to Teams Calling , and introduced new features like artificial intelligence (AI)-based noise suppression, polls , along with a new Starbucks app.