Meet 49 people at once on single screen via Microsoft Teams soon

San Francisco: Microsoft is expanding the Teams grid view to 7×7 which will accommodate up to 49 participants at once on a single screen. The feature is coming to preview soon.

Coming this fall, Breakout Rooms will allow meeting organisers to split meeting participants into small groups to enable ideation, brainstorming, learning, and discussions, the company announced late Thursday.

"Also, Microsoft Graph Connectors are now available to help you connect disparate systems and make content more accessible. Some of your favourite app improvements are also now available on more platforms—including Presenter Coach on Android and Polls in Outlook for all devices," informed Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365.

The company said that new privacy settings in Edge and Microsoft Search provide IT with the flexibility to help the customers meet compliance requirements without impacting productivity.

In a bid to make it easier to manage routine surveys in Teams channels, Microsoft said it is releasing new workflows for common scenarios like employee sentiment, employee issues and challenges, and employee health status.

"These new workflows include templates and the ability for users to choose frequency and set reminders for each Teams channel, making these surveys easy to get started and manage going forward," said Spataro.

Microsoft has already released new custom background effects in Teams. People can now customise background by uploading one of their own images or choosing one from the collections of backgrounds available online.

This feature is available to all users.

"Microsoft Search indexes all your Microsoft 365 data to make it searchable for users. With Microsoft Graph connectors, your organization can index third-party data hosted on-premises or in public and private clouds, so they appear in your Microsoft Search results," informed Spataro.

Other new features in Microsoft 365 include finding answers with natural language queries across apps.

In Microsoft Word, one can ask questions related to the document and get answers based on the contents of the document.

In Outlook, short responses are suggested based on the context of the message.

"Next, Excel users can now perform an analysis by asking plain language questions. Finally, SharePoint users can now see an ‘At a glance' summary of a document's content," said Spataro.