Microsoft Teams Turns Two

On the second anniversary of its release, Microsoft has announced some new milestones for Teams, its chat-based collaboration solution.

“Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion,” Microsoft 365 general manager Lori Wright notes. “We’re unveiling eight new capabilities in Teams that make collaboration more inclusive, effective, and secure.”

But first, the milestones: Teams is now in use by over 500,000 organizations, including 91 of the Fortune 100. The product is currently available in 44 languages across 181 markets, and Microsoft plans to roll it out support for nine additional languages—Hindi, Filipino, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam—soon.

Following up on the mobile Teams experiences that Microsoft unveiled in January, the firm today is highlighting 8 new features that are coming soon:

• Customized, green screen-like backgrounds for video chat
• Support for Microsoft’s Intelligent Capture technologies so that USB cameras can be used to capture content like whiteboard images and text
• Support for Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams so that in-person attendees can also contribute
• Live captions for those who are deaf or hard of hearing
• Secure private channels so that content can be limited to the right audience without having to create separate teams
• Information barriers to avoid conflicts of interest within an organization and limit which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations so that sensitive information is automatically detected and protected

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