Key Takeaways
- Speaker recognition coming to Teams Rooms in June for easier meeting recap and perspective summary.
- Teams will introduce more notifications and better discoverability features in June update.
- New Outlook to feature RSVP improvements, more storage capacity, and Copilot app, with updates in July and December.
Last week, a VPN bug hit Windows 11 and 10 PCs with the April non-security update, drawing anger from people affected by it. Not everything was undesirable, however. If you’re a Microsoft 365 user, the company gave you plenty of reasons to be excited in the form of new features in Excel, changes in Teams, OneDrive, and other Microsoft 365 apps. In addition, Microsoft agave us a glimpse of what to expect in the future via updates to the roadmap site.
It’s time for another weekly digest on all the important new features coming to Microsoft 365. From informing you what and when new features are coming to explaining the possible scenarios in which they can come in handy, we decode everything added to the roadmap sites last week.
2 Microsoft Teams: more productive meetings, better discoverability, and more
Speaker recognition
Microsoft announced a plethora of new features for Teams Rooms in February this year, but not all the capabilities were rolled out immediately to the users, speaker recognition being one of those. Luckily, you won’t have to wait for a very long time.
Microsoft will finally introduce speaker recognition and attribution to all Teams Rooms next month (Feature ID: 394668). As the name suggests, it simply identifies the speaker and attributes their contribution to the transcript accordingly. This way, it makes things easier for Intelligent Meeting Recap or Copilot in Teams to summarize everyone’s perspective. When available, meeting participants will need to complete the simple face and voice enrollment process for speaker recognition to be enabled.
More Notifications, better discoverability
Speaker recognition won’t be the only exciting feature in Teams. Microsoft also has other features planned for release in June, including the ability to discover which Workflows template was used when users receive a Workflows card in Chats and Channels (Feature ID: 393923). Another noteworthy change coming to Teams is notifying users when IT admins unblock an app they previously requested (Feature ID: 389151).
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1 Microsoft Outlook: more reasons to use the new Outlook, more storage for email archives, Copilot app, and more
Microsoft has planned plenty of goodies for Outlook users in the next few months. However, of all the changes planned, one is particularly interesting and will finally allow lots of users to embrace the new Outlook: being able to send updates only to added and removed attendees (Feature ID: 394687).
Many users complain on the community website that every time a change is made to the attendee list, the new Outlook sends updates to everyone on the list. Turning off the new Outlook brings back the feature, though. If you’re one of those with the same complaint, Microsoft will add this to the new Outlook for Windows and web in July.
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New RSVP setting
Two new RSVP settings from classic Outlook are coming to the new Outlook for Windows and web. Come this July, users will be able to tweak the setting to not allow Outlook to automatically delete invitation emails after RSVPing (Feature ID: 394681). The other one will allow Outlook to detect and auto-decline invitations if attendees’ calendars show as busy.
Before introducing new RSVP settings, Microsoft will bring some solid improvements to the event context menu to make it easier for the users to respond to meeting invitations (Feature ID: 394680). And it will do so by introducing all the RSVP options “on the first level of menu”, eliminating the need for users to dig through submenus to find them. Also, when responding to invitations, you’ll see separate options to respond to the current instance of the event or all the events in the series. These improvements are set to arrive for the new Outlook for Windows and the web next month.
More storage capacity for email archives and the Copilot app
Microsoft has something to offer to Outlook users on Mac, too. Auto-expanding archiving functionality will also be available in Outlook for Mac in December this year (Feature ID: 395793), allowing users to add additional storage space to mailbox archives beyond the 100GB quota limit.
Moreover, Microsoft will start previewing the Copilot app in the left app bar both in classic Outlook (Feature ID: 388753) and Outlook for Windows (Feature ID: 388754) from this month, with general availability next month.
Release timelines are subject to change
The release timelines mentioned on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap site should be taken with a grain of salt. Microsoft has a bad reputation for delaying a feature multiple times after announcing it. So, keep your expectations in check. However, what’s more likely to happen next week is Microsoft introducing us to another set of upcoming Microsoft 365 features for release in the coming months.