Microsoft is really rolling out some valuable features with Teams, especially for meetings! This one has been out for a while, but I wanted to give it some attention because it’s easy to ignore or forget about. It’s now possible to turn on live captions for your meetings, which increases accessibility and paves the way for the new “Recap” feature that is rolling out. I’ll be doing a separate post about that in the future, but it will include a copy of the meeting transcript, recording, shared documents and any notes left in the chat. I tested out the live caption feature quite a bit this week and it works pretty well–I’d say it correctly captured about 95% of what I said. It even includes punctuation!
If you’re working from home, you’re probably dealing with some sort of background noise–kids, dogs, construction, all of the above… (if this is you, hang in there!) Thankfully, Microsoft released noise suppression settings for Teams in December. Keep reading to learn where to adjust this setting. Read More
For years, a workaround has been required to add group/shared calendars to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has finally released a feature to add a shared calendar to a channel in Teams. Before you get too excited, though, note that it does not seem to be possible to connect to an existing group calendar like you do in the proposed workaround! You can now, however, add a new calendar shared with the members of a channel. Read More
Imagine you’re sharing your screen, and Teams messages keep popping up. You just know everyone is reading the message previews. No longer! I know many of you have been waiting for this feature for a long time–you can finally turn off message previews in Microsoft Teams. Hooray! Keep reading to view step-by-step instructions. Read More
Very recently, Microsoft revamped the Teams notification settings page to make it easier and faster to use. The new organization splits the settings into the following categories: Email, Appearance and Sound, Teams and Channels, Chat, Meetings, People, and Other.
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Good news, folks! The search function in Microsoft Teams has never been easier. You can now navigate to any chat or channel, and press Ctrl+F (Windows users) or Cmd+F (Mac users). You’ll notice the global search bar at the top change slightly: Read More
Microsoft has recently added a new feature to Teams that allows you to see basic information about a channel at the click of a button. You can instantly see the team the channel belongs to, members that recently contributed to the channel, a full list of all channel members, and recent updates to the channel. You can even add members to the team right from the Info pane if your permissions allow it. Read More
While I typically work with clients who have Microsoft Exchange and use Outlook, there are occasionally instances where folks need to use Outlook in conjunction with Google Calendar–usually to view personal or family calendars. Below, I’ll outline how to add a read-only copy of your Google Calendar to Outlook. Any updates made to the Google Calendar will appear in Outlook, but you will not be able to publish changes to the calendar from Outlook–that will still need to be done from Google. (Note, there are some paid plugins that allow you to make changes to the calendar from Outlook).
Microsoft 365 TEAMS is a collaboration application that can be used to organize meetings, facilitate conversations among group members over chat and video as well as share files across groups. It integrates well with Microsoft Outlook and many other products.
To add Planner to streamline your workflow, follow the steps below:
2020 Update: Microsoft is still working on implementing an out-of-the-box solution for this as of February 2020. I’ve made a few wording updates to the steps below to make the steps a bit more clear.
Per this UserVoice post, Microsoft is working to make Group Calendars native to Microsoft Teams via the “Meetings”/Calendar view, but below you’ll find one potential workaround in the meantime. Please note that the below workaround may not work for users with On Premise mailboxes.
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