New apps, noise suppression, and more for Teams

This month, they’ve announced the general availability of Teams apps for meetings, expanded Forms integration, and new capabilities that make it easier to build apps and bots right within Teams.

Enrich your meeting experience with Teams apps—Typically, collaborating with an app during a meeting required someone sharing their screen while they updated tasks, set reminders, managed requests, and more. This month, they’ve announced that you can now bring the capabilities of many of these apps directly into the meeting experience for everyone to interact with, making the time your team spends together more effective and collaborative before, during, and after your meetings. Checkout the new Teams apps for meetings now available in the Teams app store, including Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect (with more on the way), as well as familiar apps built by Microsoft such as Forms.

Quickly gather feedback in Teams meetings with polls—Polls are a great way to turn passive listeners into active participants. Forms’ integration with Teams now brings the power of polls to meetings, helping you conduct more engaging, informative, and productive meetings. Meeting presenters can prepare polls in advance and launch the polls during meetings that attendees can easily view and answer. The new Forms polls for meetings is currently rolling out and will reach you soon. You can get started by updating your Teams app and adding the Forms app to your meeting tabs.

Remove unwelcome background noise in Teams meetings—Earlier this year, they released the ability to minimise distracting background noise in videos on Microsoft Stream. We are excited to share that they’re bringing this technology to Teams meetings. This real-time noise suppression will help remove unwelcome background noise during your meetings, making easier to hear speakers in loud and distracting environments.

Automate routine tasks without leaving Teams—Also new this month is the Power Automate app for Teams. The app provides a lightweight designer experience and a number of templates to help you quickly get started building workflows right within Teams. This new app makes it even quicker and easier to automate routine tasks within Teams. To get started, make sure you’re running the latest version of Teams.

Easily build and deploy apps and intelligent chat bots in Teams—In September, they announced a new Power Apps and a new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, running on a built-in low code data platform, now called Microsoft Dataverse for Teams— making it easy for creators to quickly build and deploy apps and bots for Teams—now those apps are generally available. Teams users can easily build applications and bots directly within Teams without needing to deal with connecting to storage, managing integrations, or switching applications. Dataverse for Teams makes the back-end tech logistics of creating and deploying business process solutions in Teams easier than ever. Built-in security and governance features provide seamless control of access to apps, bots, and flows, as well as their underlying data.

Find and share information more quickly

New capabilities help make it easier to find notes while working across Microsoft 365, capture and share content, and pick up where you left off.

Easily reference your notes when working on a OneNote page—Last month, they announced the OneNote feed for Outlook on the web, which conveniently combines your notes across Sticky Notes, recent OneNote pages, and even Samsung Notes so you can easily reference them while composing your mail. This makes it easy to reference your notes when working in a OneNote page and capture any new thoughts you have by creating a Sticky Note in your feed without having to leave OneNote. The OneNote fees is available in OneNote, OneNote on the web, OneNote for Windows 10, Outlook on the web, and Outlook.com. To get started in OneNote, click the Open feed icon in the top right corner of the OneNote app window to display the feed pane.

Capture and share web content and more in Microsoft Edge—This month, they released two new features to help make you more productive and find information more easily. First, Web capture in Microsoft Edge lets you easily capture and mark up web content, and then save or share it—simply drag a box to select what you want to capture even if you need to scroll. Second, they’ve added news and information from your favorite content providers in a new “My Feed” section within the enterprise new tab page. This customisable feed sits alongside your Office 365 content and is designed to keep you connected to information most relevant to your industry or your company.

Quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and more in OneDrive for iOS—A new home experience on the iOS mobile app for OneDrive will help you quickly pick up where you left off on recent files and easily re-discover memories from the past. Plus, you can now add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen that displays your photo memories on this day across previous years. See your recent files and On This Day photos as soon as you open the OneDrive app. To get started, update your OneDrive iOS app.

Get Yammer notifications in your Teams activity feed and more—This month, we’re announcing several new and upcoming features in Yammer. Coming soon, notifications from your Yammer announcements and mentions will show up in your Microsoft Teams activity feed if you have the Communities app installed. We’re also now rolling out an updated experience in the Yammer Tab for Teams that brings modern capabilities like pinning, cover photos, live events, and more. Finally, also released this month is support for Yammer Q and A insights in Microsoft Productivity Score, an interactive guide to get the most out of Yammer, and an updated experience for topics and hashtags in Yammer.

Prevent data loss and diagram your IT solutions

New capabilities make it easier to prevent data loss on endpoints and sketch out IT solutions build on ASW.

Protect sensitive information on your endpoints—In July, they announced the public preview of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP) which extends their data protection capabilities to devices. Now generally available, Endpoint DLP enables organisations to enforce policies that identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive information consistently across cloud, on-premises, and endpoints. We’re also adding new capabilities to a public preview based on feedback from customers—such as adding enforcement actions and locations-based sensitivity, a new dashboard in Microsoft 365 compliance center to manage DLP alerts, and more.

Sketch your Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture in Visio for the web—Diagrams are a great way for cloud architects to visualize the design, deployment, and topology of IT solutions built on AWS. We’re excited to announce that they’ve added support to build AWS diagrams for various topologies and service interactions in Visio for the web. More than 400 shapes are available to help architects redesign existing infrastructure diagrams, conceptualise application architecture, or visualise the current state of your cloud environment and plan for the future. To help you get started easily, they’ve provided a few starter diagrams using various AWS services. Go to the Visio web app homepage and select your preferred diagram template to quickly start visualizing your AWS infrastructure.