We’ve made it through 2024 and unbelievably 2025 is just around the corner.  While 2024 has been an “interesting” year, there have been a lot of good things to come from it in Microsoft Teams land.  A few of these are:
  • Enhanced Calling Features: Microsoft Teams has introduced new calling features aimed at improving call quality and reliability. This includes the redesign of the existing VDI optimization for Teams, which enables enhanced performance, faster meeting joins, new codecs, and higher success rates for creating and joining meetings and screensharing.
  • Best Practice Configuration Recommendations: IT admins can now monitor and identify best practice recommendations to ensure the highest quality Teams collaboration experience, especially for calls and meetings.
  • VOCA Solution for Teams SIP Trunks: This new feature allows integration with CRM systems, providing detailed pop-ups and inbound routing. For example, it can route a customer to their Account Manager or automate account status requests without needing to deliver a call to a staff member.
  • Co-Pilot for Microsoft Teams Voice: Leveraging AI, Co-Pilot transforms the way enterprises manage and enhance business communication. It helps in optimising voice services and provides insights on effective implementation.
  • Migration to Becketts based Teams Voice: Colleges, Councils and Universities have moved from Microsoft-supplied Teams Voice to our SIP-based Teams Voice, resulting in significant cost savings and functionality increases.
  • Flexible Integration with Existing Systems: Teams now allows seamless integration with existing systems like Mitel, enabling organisations to pick and choose which users are on Teams and which remain on their current systems
Microsoft Places: One of the most exciting products announced at Microsoft Ignite 2024 is Microsoft Places, an AI-powered workplace solution for flexible work available with a Teams Premium license. Places intelligently allows you to coordinate your hybrid team to make the most of in-office days, modernise how employees make connections, and optimise space management with occupancy and utilization data
  • Email Verification for External Participants: Microsoft Teams now enhances the security and trustworthiness of your meetings with a new feature: email verification for external participants. This allows meeting organisers with a Teams Premium license to require external participants to verify their email addresses with a one-time passcode (OTP) before joining the meeting
  • Control Your Mic State During Meetings: Users can now control their mic state during meetings directly from the Windows taskbar
  • Audio Flyout and Settings in Teams Meetings: New audio flyout and settings have been introduced in Teams meetings to provide a better user experience
  • New Discover Feed in Teams Channels: A new Discover feed has been added to Teams channels to help users find relevant content more easily
  • Simplified Team Creation Experience: Microsoft Teams is getting a simplified team creation experience to make it easier for users to create and manage teams
As you can see a lot of things have happened, and we at Becketts are going to be taking a few days to digest these changes – so we’ll be off until January 3rd .  As ever our support desk and engineers are available through the holiday period, but from all of us hopefully you’ll get some time of too, and we look forward to speaking in 2025.