Microsoft Teams Gets Private Channels, New Linux App, Outlook Integration

Microsoft is announcing massive new updates for Microsoft Teams at Ignite this week. The company is ramping up Teams’ feature set with a bunch of new features and integrations that deepens its tie with the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft is giving users more controls over their channels, with a new option to create private channels within existing teams. These new private channels allow anyone to create a channel with specific members from the team, so they are hidden from everyone else that’s not part of the channel.

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Microsoft Teams is also getting a new client for Linux. Since the Teams app is built on Electron, the new Linux app will offer a similar experience as the Windows and Mac clients on Linux. Microsoft says it will distribute native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats for the new Linux client. It will be launching later this year in a preview.

Elsewhere, Microsoft is introducing a bunch of new integrations for Teams. Outlook now lets you share an email conversation including its attachments right from the Outlook app to a Teams chat. You can also now access your Microsoft To Do tasks, as well as tasks from Team channels, Planner, and Outlook within a single, dedicated Tasks page within Teams. There’s also a new Yammer app that makes it easy to access all your Yammer data right from Teams.

And last but not least, Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams is now generally available, that means you can now collaborate in a digital canvas with others from your team. The experience is pretty powerful, considering you can just open it up right from the app and everyone else can simply join in whenever they want and contribute at the same time.

Microsoft Teams is getting a number of other new features, so if you are a Teams user, I would definitely check out the full list of announcements that involve a number of new enterprise-focused features as well.

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Conversation 6 comments

  • goodbar

    Premium Member
    04 November, 2019 - 3:14 pm

    <p>Finally! Been waiting for Whiteboard forever, looking forward to that feature…</p>

  • dontbeevil

    05 November, 2019 - 12:32 am

    <p>I miss Teams so much, my current company use Slack</p>

    • drewidian

      05 November, 2019 - 9:37 am

      <blockquote><a href="#486477"><em>In reply to dontbeevil:</em></a><em> </em></blockquote><p>I feel your pain. Teams is a much better product, but my organization chose slack because a number of our partners use it. We subscribe to Office 365, but we never deployed Teams outside of a small pilot group. To get Slack to a comparable position to Teams we had to add Zoom, Box, Monday, and several other applications. The cost is more than double what we get for just Office 365. Our executive team is very pro Apple and if it doesn't work on Macs and ios, they won't go for it. I'm hoping that in 2 years when we have to reevaluate our slack contract we make the switch.</p>

  • bmcdonald

    05 November, 2019 - 1:56 pm

    <p>Yeah sure – but what about CPU usage? </p><p><br></p><p>Is MS even aware of how bad this thing grinds a Surface Pro when the app is sitting in the system tray?</p><p><br></p><p>B</p>

  • drewidian

    05 November, 2019 - 3:57 pm

    <blockquote><em><a href="#486609">In reply to dontbeevil:</a></em></blockquote><p>I tried to tell our management that Teams works on apple devices as well a Windows, but they are so anti-Microsoft that they couldn't see it despite how much it could improve our efficiency and help our employees work better. In that regard, we need a sweeping out of the old guard.</p>

    • dontbeevil

      06 November, 2019 - 6:20 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#486674">In reply to drewidian:</a></em></blockquote><p>I feel your pain, apple fans are like this… hope they're enjoying all apple issues for the latest months/years</p>

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