Features in Microsoft Teams That You May or May Not Know Exist, and How to Use Them - Pt.1

There’s this child-like feeling that comes with using or trying something new – the excitement, eagerness to explore, and experience its amazing features. You can probably relate, however, imagine if you didn’t have sufficient time to learn or explore something you own. This is how we imagine the experience is for individuals/companies that started using Microsoft Teams as a result of the abrupt switch from office work to remote work caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19). The excitement might be short-lived because there’s so much to learn in such little time. You’re left to stick to the basic stuff, freestyle using it, and just go with the “we move” feeling.

We understand this situation, which is why we are sharing features in Teams that will help save time, and make your usage a more seamless one.

Pop-Out a Teams Chat in a Window: Popping out a chat window in Teams serves a similar purpose as having different windows open in your favourite browser. Microsoft recently rolled-out this feature to help users streamline their workflow and participate in different conversations simultaneously. It’s important to note that right now, this feature works for one-on-one chats, and group chats that don’t have external users (people outside your organisation) in them. We are not sure of Microsoft’s reason for this, but we’ll definitely update you if there are any changes.

Put Up a Golden Hand : Raise your hand if you’ve ever been interrupted or you’ve interrupted someone talking during a meeting. I know I have! And often, this is unintentional as it tends to be caused by a network/audio lag. It’s one of the cons of online meetings; however, Microsoft has introduced its “raise your hand” to address this. This feature enables meeting attendees notify the speaker and everyone else in the meeting that they want to speak. A golden hand appears on the attendee’s profile, indicating that, that attendee wants to speak, and after being granted the opportunity to, the hand can be lowered by the attendee, organiser, or any other of the meeting attendees. This reduces the chance of attendees talking at the same time, and ensures an even more seamless meeting experience.

Mic Check 1, 2, 3: Meeting mishaps are unavoidable. However, we can do our best on our part to ensure that we avoid such mishaps as no audio, no video or poor network, by testing before joining a meeting or making a call. The two ways available to test your audio, video and network are by using the “/testcall” command or selecting “PC and Device settings” as you are about to join a call/meeting. Using the command starts a call with the Teams Echo bot which requires you to record your message, have it played back for you to hear, then you get a report on your audio, video, and network is given after this. Meanwhile, making a test call by selecting PC and Device Settings before a meeting, opens up a dialogue to the right showing you your current device settings, and providing you with an option to make a test call to the Teams Echo bot, with the same process mentioned earlier.

While Microsoft Teams is robust, there are functions and features that can save you a lot of time, and ensure you have a smooth communication and collaboration experience. We hope you get to explore all of these features, if you haven’t already. Also, please feel free to let us know the features that you just discovered exist in Microsoft Teams, and don’t forget to share too! 🙂