If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you know a bit about Microsoft Teams.  You might even be using it for some or all of its workloads.  On the other hand, maybe you’re Teams curious and looking for reasons to try it out.  This post is for all of you.

New Microsoft Teams Icon

Microsoft Teams, or Teams as I like to call it, burst onto the scene almost two years ago as a collaboration tool in Office 365.  Sitting alongside similar applications like Skype for Business (Online) and to a lesser degree Yammer.  Microsoft call it, the hub for teamwork.  And I tend to agree with that.  The word hub implies that Teams is at the centre and the spokes are the features.

Teams is built on a modern, microservice based, cross-platform architecture.  This type of architecture gives the product team a massive canvass for improvements, additions and changes.  Which means that Teams will always be getting better.

Uservoice

I have no doubt that Microsoft themselves has a list of changes and improvements they want to make.  But on top of that, there’s the Teams uservoice forum.

If you haven’t seen the Teams uservoice forum I suggest you take a look and get registered.  It is your chance to have your say and help shape this great product.  If you want something you don’t see in Teams, search for it on Uservoice.  Chances are, someone else has thought if it or something similar and you can help vote the idea up.  If it’s not there, add it as a new idea and get your friends, colleagues or social media community behind you so they can help vote it up.

Uservoice isn’t just a dead drop where ideas go to die.  It is a living breathing hive of activity.  Ideas, popular or not, are evaluated by the Microsoft product team for their merit and achievability.  They add remarks and change the status of ideas as they move up the list.  Often changing from idea to, “needs more feedback”, “on the back-log”, “planned”, “working on it”,  “partially done” and lastly, “completed”.

Roadmap

About 15 month ago, Microsoft published a publicly facing roadmap for Teams.  That in itself isn’t that unusual.  Vendors do have ambitions and products have roadmaps.  But what was really surprising was that they put dates on things to be achieved.  With no less than 70 items, it was a fairly big list, and ambitious to say the least.  The threw down the gauntlet on themselves.  And this wasn’t some wishy washy list of things stretching years in the future.  The completion date was set for the end of calendar year 2018.

The original idea behind the list was to list all the things that were available in Skype for Business Online with Phone System and map out when these things would be migrated to the Teams platform.  It focused on 3 key workloads; Messaging, Meetings and Calling.

Messaging

Roadmap_Messaging

Meetings

Roadmap_Meetings

Calling

Roadmap_Calling

Microsoft updated the roadmap roughly once per quarter which showed progress.  Some things slipped a little, but one by one, every last one was delivered* not long after the deadline closed.

* Delivered is somewhat subjective of course.  Because some things said delivered, but took a little while to finally land in every tenant in every location.  Some things took weeks or months to finally appear.  Some thing appeared and disappeared.  But that is just the nature of agile microservice architecture.

The last update for the roadmap was January 2019 – Here.

New Roadmap

Microsoft didn’t stop with the porting of features from Skype for Business Online to Teams.  They kept going.  There’s a new roadmap site, not just for Teams, but for all of Microsoft 365.  You can of course filter the list to just Microsoft Teams.

new roadmap

Delivered in Teams in 2018

If you doubt Microsoft’s commitment to Teams I want you to take a look at this list of features delivered to Teams in 2018 alone.  This list is broken down into 4 categories; Communicate, Collaborate, Customize & Extend and Work with Confidence.

Communicate

  1. 1:1 to Group Call Escalation with Teams, Skype for Business, and PSTN participants
  2. Background Blur
  3. Boss and Delegate Support
  4. Broadcast Meetings (preview)
  5. Call Park
  6. Call Queues
  7. Cloud Recording
  8. Consultative Transfer
  9. Contact Groups
  10. Control who can post in the General channel
  11. Copy a link to a post
  12. Direct Routing
  13. Distinctive Ring
  14. Do not Disturb breakthrough
  15. Education – improved assignment functionality: smoother assignment flow,
  16. assignment notifications, find assignments quickly
  17. Education – Improved class notebook integration with assignments
  18. Federated Chat between Teams and Skype for Business
  19. Federated Meetings
  20. Forward to Group
  21. Group Call Pickup
  22. Hide/Share/Mute Chat
  23. Get important notifications while in Do not Disturb
  24. Image annotation
  25. Immersive Reader
  26. Improved personal settings
  27. Import Contacts from Skype for Business
  28. Include hyperlinks in your messages
  29. Leave a group chat
  30. Large Meeting Support (~250)
  31. Like and hide chats
  32. Lobby for PSTN callers
  33. Location-Based Routing
  34. Message Translation
  35. More channels per team
  36. Share screen from private chat
  37. @mention somebody in a chat
  38. Organizational Auto-Attendant
  39. PowerPoint Load and Share
  40. PSTN Fallback
  41. Quick reply to a chat message from pop up notification
  42. Shared lined Appearance
  43. Schedule in Outlook & Teams
  44. Send a message from the command box
  45. Send a chat from a contact card
  46. Skype for Business Interop with Persistent Chat
  47. Unified Presence
  48. Whiteboard and Meeting Notes

Collaborate

  1. Access Office 365 app launcher in web client
  2. Teams available for US GCC
  3. Create a team using a previous one as a template
  4. Free version of Teams
  5. Microsoft Remote Assist support: Call someone on a HoloLens
  6. View and edit Visio files within Teams
  7. Auto-favorite important channels
  8. New views in Microsoft Planner tab
  9. Add SharePoint pages, news articles and lists as unique tabs within channels
  10. Include information from VSTS n your conversations
  11. Quiet hours on mobile
  12. Guest access for users
  13. Support for new languages
  14. Guest access on mobile
  15. Join a team via a code
  16. Updated keyboard shortcuts

Customize & Extend

  1. Adaptive Cards
  2. Cloud Video Interop
  3. Device Portfolio including Crestron, HP, Jabra
  4. Discover apps for Teams in the new Store
  5. Work with files and your Teams bot
  6. Tailored teams created through the New Teams APIs in Microsoft Graph
  7. Include information from an app in a conversation
  8. Improved OneNote tab
  9. Include existing OneNote notebooks as a tab
  10. Enterprise app sharing through Teams enterprise catalog for apps
  11. Use slash commands, take quick actions, and search from the command box
  12. Access a personal view of your apps
  13. Message extensions
  14. New apps including Evernote, VSTS, Planner, Microsoft Flow, SurveyMonkey
  15. Who app
  16. Tabs in private chat
  17. Improved OneNote tab
  18. Skype Room Systems Support
  19. Support for existing certified SIP Phones
  20. USB HID control
  21. Trio 1 Touch Teams Meeting Join
  22. Surface Hub Support (Preview)

Work with Confidence

  1. Admin roles
  2. eDiscovery support for users in an exchange hybrid environment
  3. eDiscovery enhancements
  4. Easier updates for Mac
  5. Graph APIs
  6. Hide teams from Outlook
  7. List of teams in the admin center
  8. Message Retention Policies
  9. Messaging User-Level Policies
  10. New Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center including Messaging
  11. Policies
  12. Restore a deleted channel
  13. Updates in user level policies and organization settings
  14. New reminder that your team is expiring
  15. Install Microsoft Teams using MSI
  16. Access activity usage reports
  17. Manage Microsoft Teams via PowerShell
  18. Org-wide teams
  19. Scoped Directory Search
  20. Store your data locally in India, UK, Australia, Japan
  21. Set retention policies
  22. Support for conditional access on Macs
  23. Teams based on dynamic group membership
  24. Tenant-Level Messaging Policies
  25. Messaging Interop IT Policies
  26. User-Level Meeting Policy

Now if you don’t have something that’s on these lists, you are probably on a ring that doesn’t have it yet.  It’ll come to you at some point soon.

I think you can agree that’s quite a list!  And of course they aren’t stopping.  In 2019 so far…

Communicate

  1. Location sharing
  2. Smart camera

Collaborate

  1. Shifts
  2. Customizable mobile experience
  3. Teams available for US GCC High

Customize & Extend

  1. Create teams with Team Templates (including education, retail, and healthcare)
  2. Microsoft Teams Rooms

Work with Confidence

  1. New Usage Reports
  2. Teams-Only Mode

 

Final thoughts

I think you can agree that Microsoft is serious about making Teams the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365.  Their commitment to new features and improvements is proof of that.  And it isn’t just features on their agenda for the product that makes the cut.  With Uservoice, it’s like crowed design rather than crowd funding.  This is helping them win against the competition in this space.

Two years ago, Teams was an interesting idea.  Now it is on the verge of being ubiquitous.  Like Lync before it, it’s starting to have its own gravitational pull.  Pulling customers or course, but vendors too.  It’s just going to keep getting better and better.

If you are using Teams, well done.  I hope you like it.  If there’s something you need, pitch the idea or vote one up.  If you aren’t using it for everything, I’d love to know why.

If you aren’t using Teams, I say give it a try.  There’s a free version that requires no commitment on your part other than time.  And if you have Office 365 or Microsoft 365 it’s there waiting for you already.  What have you got to lose?

Thanks for reading.