Over the past month, Microsoft has added many new features to Teams, including animated backgrounds and improvements to Teams Phone.

A new month, a new rundown from Microsoft with all the new features introduced to Teams in August. The full list can be found here. Below we list the most important parts.

Animated wallpapers

With the Dynamic Background feature in Teams, you can replace the existing background with a dynamic animation. Microsoft sees this as an important new step towards a more immersive virtual environment. It offers different options to enrich the meeting experience through creativity and personalization according to their preferences.

You can activate the new option before the meeting starts. You can recognize the new backgrounds by the small video symbol in the lower left corner of the image. You can also select or customize such a background during a meeting.

Team Phone Updates

August has become an important month for Teams Phone. The application received an improved interface for delegating phones, and the user interface on the devices is now more streamlined. Certified devices can now also be programmed to call preset phone numbers directly, such as a factory emergency service.

Teams licenses for shared devices are now available through the Teams mobile app on Android. This allows Android phones to be set up as community phones. Employees can now make and receive calls from shared Android mobile phones, no matter where they work.

Encrypted voicemail messages are now accompanied by a handy notification that you won’t miss those important messages, and many new devices are added to the list of certified devices: AudioCodes C435HD, AudioCodes C455HD-DBW, Yealink BH71, EPOS IMPACT 1060T, B&O Beocom EX -Earbuds and Algo IP devices through the SIP gateway.

Chat and collaborate better

Now when you hover over a chat message, in addition to the emoji reactions, a button with more options and a button to reply to that specific message will automatically appear.

If you prefer it compact, you can switch on the compact mode for some time. Microsoft has now enhanced this view with additional information such as timestamps, extra blank lines and indicators of who the message in a group came from.

Finally, you can now sync to-do lists with Microsoft Loop. Both To Do and Planner are available. For example, you can easily make changes in Outlook or Teams, after which everything is automatically synchronized across platforms.

Teams rooms and new devices

Microsoft has been doing a lot of work on Teams Rooms over the past month. The so-called “front row”, where everyone is cut out of the background and appears in an environment, is now automatically resized. So they no longer have small and large heads depending on how close or far they are from the camera.

Spatial Audio is now an option you can enable to get spatial audio. The only requirement is that the speaker has left and right channels for audio and is Teams certified.

Yes, multiple streams from a room can now be handled in Teams rooms. Multi-stream IntelliFrame provides meeting room participants with their own frame in the video gallery, facial recognition of meeting room participants, active speaker detection, and panoramic video on cameras at the front of the meeting room (180-degree view) and in the center of the meeting room (360-degree view). -degree view).

Finally, Teams Panels lets you scan a QR code to quickly reserve a room, and face recognition or voice recognition is now an option to add the correct alias to the appropriate window when you’re in a room with several.

New Teams-enabled devices: Cisco Room Kit EQ and Navigator, Lenovo ThinkSmart Core with Lenovo IP Controller Kit, Jabra Speak2 75, AudioCodes RX-PANEL, Logitech Rally Bar Huddle and Yealink DeskVision A24.