Microsoft Teams – The top 10 features that are on their way

Note: This post was written in September 2017 and reflects the situation then.

Ever since the initial launch of Microsoft Teams I’ve been interested in the new features. There is a lot of new stuff arriving and every now and then I go through the Microsoft Teams Uservoice to see what is on its way.

The top 10 is of items that are on their way are:

1. External Access and Federation

Collaboration is a core element of how we work which requires the creation of extended teams on a project or long term engagement. Whilst the majority of our teams are internal staff, there is still a critical element of any project that requires the inclusion of our clients and/or external vendors. It is imperative that Microsoft Teams allows for the easy (but secure) inclusion of external parties for the length of any project or engagement.

This is why historically products like Groups etc. have not been adopted as widely as we would hope. If the tool only allows for 60-70% of a team to participate, it breaks. If a tool does not allow 100% of those who need to be involved to participate equally, if breaks and our users and clients have far too many alternative solutions that they can easily adopt (Slack etc.) to quickly and efficiently do their jobs.

Finally, making external parties sign up for a Microsoft account (such as Hotmail) to authenticate against any collaboration service does not work, and better approach is required and needed.

1. Use same presence as Skype for Business

Teams and Skype for Business are currently using a different version of online presence.  This should be a shared presence.

1. Please create a professional compact chat layout!

I really like Teams. I do. But the current chat layout is not suited for professional chats. It’s way to space consuming. It looks like something imported from MSN with smiley’s that take half of the screen. I would say that Slack have nailed it because they focused on the ability keeping a tight window with lots of chat text visible. In Teams the window is full and starts scrolling after like 10 sentences.

1. Ability to see who is in a channel

Ability to see who is currently in a channel. Hipchat and Slack have this feature

1. Allow use of existing OneNotes/documents for channels

My team has a pre-existing OneNote. It would be really helpful to be able to create a tab that uses this, rather than being forced to start with a blank notebook.

1. Code snippets

I would like code snippets with highlighting based on code language. And for snippets longer than X lines, a “show more” button (like slack)

1. Ability to archive channels and chats

Would be nice if we had the ability to archive channels. For example: we created a channel for a specific project. Once the project is complete, we can archive that channel or at least move it out of the primary view. I could see the channel list getting large and clunky quickly with multiple projects many of which are complete.

Also, when a conversation in the channel is complete it should be archived or hidden.

1. Hide the reply button under every message

The “reply” button is WAY too large under each message. I recommend either making the button just a smaller icon and off to the side of a message, or only showing it on hover.

1. Enable screen sharing without video call

Enable an option to start a screen sharing session without starting a video call. This is a common use case in our organization.

1. I want to use multiple Teams accounts at the same time

LOG INTO MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS
Original user posted:
I would like to heave this multi-team/tenant option within “MS Teams”, like in Slack. Currently I’m in four different organization. They’re using all office365, three of them now changed from Slack to Teams. I’ve to permanently login/logout to switch to the related MS Team. This is really time consuming.

Another user says:
We need the ability to sign in with multiple accounts. Many of us have several O365 accounts for various reasons (consulting, etc), and we’d need to be able to access teams directly.
This is not a federation or B2B scenario, but a case where new O365 credentials have been created in another tenant for us. The app today only allows a single signed-in account at a time and that’s a blocker.

SHARED CHANNELS ACROSS TEAMS
From a merged idea:
Please add support for shared channels which could be used in multiple teams. Suppose there is one company-wide team with multiple channels. It would be great if all teams within the company could include these channels or at least one of them in their own team. In that way you don’t have to recreate the channel for every team again.

There are other user voice items that users really want in the top 10 most requested items, however the above lists shows the most requests items that Microsoft is working on at the moment.

Currently I’m in need of better recording options within Microsoft teams. Well at least now I can see that this is the 17th most urgent item that Microsoft is working on at the moment:

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16993519-recording-of-video-meetings