MS Teams 9/2021 update highlights

Present from powerpoint to teams

IF you store your presentation on MS OneDrive or sharepoint, powerpoint will show a [Present in Teams] button in the upper right corner (next to [Comments]). You will then have a presenter view in your teams meeting while attendees see the real slides.

Presenter mode

When sharing the screen, you can now have your camera a(i.e. your face) as an inset in the shared screen

Breakout rooms assignment enhanced

You can now easily find which person is in which breakout room.

Chat

Live reactions

Users can now highlight icons to communicate their state of mind. These are the same icons as the ones you use as a short reaction to a chat message. 

Chat bubbles

Chat messages can now appear as callouts for the corresponding person in the participant gallery.

Pin messages

You can pin important chat messsages to make them standout from a long chat flow. The option is in the ... menu you have on your own chat messages (same place as Edit, Remove...)

more...

MS Teams integrates PowerPoint

When sharing content in Microsoft Teams, the pane to choose the screen/window to share has now moved to the right (was bottom), on my version (1.4.00.1116). 

In the pane a new option PowerPoint Live has been added. 

It opens slides directly in presenter view in teams, while attendees see the presentation itself. Attendees can even (individually) browse to other pages, if you allow them to.

Great addition, and more features are coming. Here's a Microsoft article on this, but take care: all features discussed have not been rolled out yet at the time of this writing.

Most annoying problem is that it does not remember which presentations you loaded from your local machine, so you have to reload them every time you leave the presentation to share your screen.

Salesforce buys Slack

 Cloud CRM juggernaut Salesforce has gobbled up the Slack team collaboration platform for $28bn.

Although Slack was still growing at a healthy pace, it was bypassed by MS Teams last year.

With the backing of Salesforce, Slack will be have the means to strike back.

 

A Salesforce MVP (Most Valuable Professional) : 

There is still no compelling reason to use Slack over Chatter. You still should NOT share your corporate data out to any external system, even Teams.

They're already convinced it's better than Teams. But why did day cash out all that money if they've got something better in house?