Microsoft refreshes Teams with new integrations

Microsoft has integrated Outlook with its Teams platform, along with a host of changes to make the communications platform more efficient to businesses.

The new features are available from March and are a strategic push from the tech giant to make Teams the ultimate enterprise communications platform.

Users can now move an email conversation directly from Outlook into a Teams chat, simply by clicking a button, and also move the conversations the other way into emails.

There are also options for tagging members of an organisation, so users can target messages (similar to Slack). For example, a manager can @mention their entire department in a given channel and get their message out to the relevant people at once.

What's more, there's also a feature to create an "org-wide" (organisation-wide) conversation. This is mostly for small and medium-sized businesses, which have less than 5,000 employees.

Calls and meetings have also seen changes as Microsoft has added live captions. This can be turned on during a call and will subtitle what the parties are saying in real-time. This, the company said, will help when calls are made from busy places, where words can be lost in the background noise.

The feature is only available in English at the moment, but there are plans to offer more languages in the near future.

Security has also been given a boost with new measures that let administrators monitor the content shared on the platform. This is a new feature where private channel chats can be placed on hold in a stored mailbox, should it be necessary for a message on a certain topic to be saved.

This also includes a communication compliance feature that both minimises HR risks to the business and helps administrators detect, capture and take remediation actions for inappropriate messages.