Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 News
Teams General Channel is no more, coming September (MC814583). For a while, you have been able to rename the General Channel, but soon, when you create a new team in the Teams client, you won't be able to create a channel called General. You will be prompted for the name of the first channel, which must be something other than General. And once you've renamed General channels, you can't return them to General.
Teams created by TAC/PowerShell/Graph will still have the default General Channel; that change has no ETA.
A really exciting coming feature is call queues is callback. This is the ability for someone waiting in a queue to press a digit to indicate they'd rather be called back than wait on hold. Documentation TBC, but we are seeing some of those settings in PowerShell. It doesn't seem limited to the queues app or premium, either.
Intelligent Meeting Recap is coming for ad hoc meetings and calls (roadmap November). Previously, it was only for scheduled meetings, but now it is also for Meet Now or ad hoc calls, i.e., you start from a chat and escalate to a call. When you hit record, you will automatically get that intelligent recap.
No more metadata when you copy-paste chat messages from Teams (MC878422). I'm a big fan of this, but I have heard others who like it. A good use case I heard was coping chat messages for an incident report (Isn't Copilot Generating those now?).
Other client updates are rolling out: Request to join a shared channel via shared channel link – if you are not a member and get the link, you will see a button to request joining. Channel cards (MC797474) - a quick overview of a channel using its channel card. Show/hide Discover feed and Apps now supported in group chats with external users (MC779844).
Town hall is getting many updates: Intelligent meeting recap review on Android phones for unscheduled town halls, town hall reactions, town hall Graph APIs (not premium), Teams webinar creation and registration APIs, and Town hall export Q&A questions.
I mentioned in previous updates that the Teams Chat Notification Service retirement on 30th September would cause some older out-of-support Teams Phones to stop working; now, Microsoft has decided to update some of those phones to keep them working (still unsupported). If you have old phones, check out MC875186 or the monthly update briefing for more details.
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows are getting the ability to Start Stop recording on the MTR (Pro) (MC884009). Dynamic video tile size based on occupancy count - 1 person in the room, normal video tile size, 2+ people in the room, tile expands to be four times larger and Text and UI resizing.
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android Custom Backgrounds (Pro) are now rolling out, and you can Join Zoom meetings with ID and passcode on Teams Rooms on Android.
Also, PowerPoint live support for Cloud Video Interop (CVI) coming November.
Not loads on Copilot this month, but we will undoubtedly get a lot of news on the M365 Copilot Wave 2 event on 16th Sept (I'll be covering it and will report back the key news). Copilot for Microsoft 365 will support 12 new languages this month (roadmap)
As always, for more detail, check out the monthly update briefing.