What’s new and next in Teams and Microsoft 365 #4

Updates on Teams at the university:

Your privacy, and the privacy of our students, is important to us so we have created guidance for meeting organisers and attendees to make sure that anyone who wishes to remain anonymous in a meeting, or opt-out of video recordings can do so.

Stay on top of your Teams with regular maintenance. Remove unwanted channels and posts and where appropriate, delete entire Teams you no longer need. Don't forget to save data from the Team or Channel in an appropriate location, according to our Data Classification and Data Retention policies. 

Microsoft also provide regular updates to our Microsoft 365 environment:

You can now transcribe your audio and video recordings using Word for web, which you can access via login.gre.ac.uk. This means you can upload pre-recorded audio files or record yourself talking to get the audio transcribed. At this time, we are each limited to two hours of transcription time per month for uploaded recordings, but there is no restriction on live recordings. Don't forget that Moodle, Panopto and Teams also offer auto-transcription services, see our Creating Inclusive Content pages for everything you need to create fully accessible resources.

New meeting features are now available in Teams. You need to activate these meeting features to be able to access them now. They include Together Mode, Dynamic and Large Gallery View, as well as Focus Mode, which removes the video feed so you can focus on the content being shared. 

The new meeting experience will also include virtual Breakout Rooms, which are due "early in Quarter 4". Breakout Rooms will include random or manual assignment of students, moving students from one room to another, sending announcements to each breakout group, and bringing students back all at once to the main class when they are ready. We know virtual breakout rooms are hotly anticipated so we are keeping an eye on this development and will update you as soon as we have a confirmed go-live date.

As a stopgap, and to help you run Breakout Rooms from the start of term, the Academic Support Team are running training sessions to show you how to create and use Teams Channels as Breakout Rooms. Share the experiences of colleagues who have used online breakout rooms and get top-tips for preparing and facilitating online breakout spaces for your students. (See below for more information.)

Changes are also being made to Multi-Factor Authentication via the Microsoft Authenticator app.
Microsoft are switching on App Lock by default to help make sure that only you can approve your login notifications. This change means that you will need to launch the app (on iOS) or launch a dialog (on Android) and provide an additional PIN/biometrics gesture before you can approve the authentication request. To switch this option off, you can go to the Settings page in the Authenticator app and switch the App Lock toggle to the Off position.