This year’s Microsoft Ignite looks very promising. The Microsoft product team has announced lots of new incredible capabilities and products and we’d love to share with you the 10 most exciting ones that we know we’ll use at nBold 😊

Microsoft Teams

1. Mesh avatars in Microsoft Teams

Mesh avatars allow you to choose how you’ll show up in Teams meetings with your camera tuned off with a customized animated version of yourself!

To use it, you need to install the Avatars app in the Teams App Store. You can design up to three unique avatars with hundreds of customization options.

Once you create your avatar, you can use it during a Teams by selecting the option from the “Effects and Avatars” menu before joining the meeting. Moreover, while in a meeting, you can choose from a variety of gestures to react to conversations.

This feature is now available in private preview.

2. Microsoft Teams Premium

Microsoft Teams Premium is a new add-on that will make every meeting more personalized, intelligent and secure.  It will be available in preview in December with general availability in February 2023.

Here are the main highlights of Teams Premium: 

• – Meeting guides managed by IT for a more personalized experience during meetings – be that a call with a client, prospecting call, brainstorming session, or others.

• – Custom logos and backgrounds during Teams meetings and for the lobby, as well as setting custom scenes for Together mode.
• – Teams meetings’ recaps. 

• – Automatically generated and assigned AI-generated tasks after meetings.
• – Meeting recordings have highlights important moments in the meeting.
• – Real-time translations for 40 spoken languages.
• – Advanced meeting protection.
• – Advanced webinars.

3. New Teams meetings features

Here are some new engaging Teams meetings features that were announced during Microsoft Ignite:

• – Cameo is now generally available. It’s a PowerPoint experience that allows you to seamlessly integrate your camera feed into a PowerPoint live presentation and customize how you appear on slides.

Microsoft Support

• – Collaborate with your team on an Excel spreadsheet in real-time through a meeting window though Excel Live. The feature is rolling out starting in October.
• – Meeting organizers can now assign seats to meeting participants in the Together mode view and select Together mode for everyone. 

4. New collaborative apps for Teams

Here are some new exciting apps that are now available in the Teams App Store: 

• 3M – their Post-It® app allows users to digitize handwritten notes. With your phone or laptop camera you can translate handwritten or drawn Post-It® notes onto your digital whiteboard.
• iHeartRadio – allows users to listen to music while working and share radio stations with team members. It’s the first music app in Teams!

There are also lots of other exciting new apps to explore by Microsoft partners such as Workday. Zendesk, ServiceNow, Zoho and others.

Microsoft Viva

5. New features in Microsoft Viva Insights

Here’s what’s new in Microsoft Viva Insights:

• – After a Teams meeting you can now fill a Meeting effectiveness survey to get more insights into meetings’ effectiveness.
• – If you’re outside the recipient’s working hours, you can now schedule a chat message.
• – Divide Focus time into short periods of productivity followed by short breaks. At the start of Focus mode, you will receive a notification for focused work with the option to set timers with breaks. You can also choose from a series of mindfulness exercises during the breaks.
• – Set up Quiet Time to silence Teams and Outlook notifications outside working hours

6. New Microsoft Viva Learning features

And here are some new features for Microsoft Viva Learning: 

– Learning paths for creating sequenced groups of trainings. They will be available within Viva Learning and can be discovered and shared there directly.

– Learning collections for creating personal collections of learning materials.

– Audience targeting so that users can only see content that they have access to.

7. Viva Engage Storyline

Now, anyone in the organizations can update their colleagues posts with links, images, and other content that will appear on other users’ Storyline. It’s a great way to engage all employees and increase interactions with senior leadership.

You may even create Stories, that are currently in preview. They are similar to Instagram Stories you can create short videos or photos and share them with everyone in the organization. These features allow to better connect employees especially during the rise of remote and hybrid work. 

Microsoft 365

8. New features or Microsoft Project and Planner

There are several exciting new features coming to Project for the web and Microsoft Planner that will enable teams to track project goals and changes to tasks, support agility, and balance team workloads. Here’s some of the features what we can expect:

• Better align with organizations objectives and key results with the seamless integration of Planner and Project to Viva Goals. It will allow for better visibility of the team’s work and progress in each project.
• Users will be able to see all their tasks in the Assigned to Me list (includes Tasks in Teams, Planner and To-Do).
• Users will be able to plan, prioritize and schedule the backlog of tasks into time-boxed blocks of Sprints in Project.
• There’s a new People view in Project that gives managers better understanding of workload allows for easy task reassignment. 

9. Microsoft updates Outlook with new tools for hybrid work

There are new updates coming to Outlook to help employees stay connected in the hybrid world of work by the end of the year.

You can now let your colleagues know your working hours and location so they can plan communication with you.

You will also be able to easily find a meeting recording directly from the calendar event through Meeting recap.

An exciting new feature: you will now be able to send email reactions to acknowledge an email – the same way you do on social media or on Teams!

Moreover, you can now better navigate through your emails with Editor using Context IQ. It allows to surface relevant people and files in Outlook. Context IQ is a set of capabilities that connects people with the information they require. It connects content across different Microsoft 365 products. 

10. Natural language and AI in Power Automate

A more user-friendly way for us to create automation using natural language allows users to describe what they want to automate and have AI build the flow for them!

You only need to choose a suggested flow, and the technology will appropriate connectors and then finalize it within the flow designer. The feature is now available in preview.

For more exciting updates head over to the Ignite 2022 Book of News where you can read about all the new features.