Microsoft: Here are all the new features Teams got in May 2022

Microsoft rolled a host of updates to Teams in May, bringing more video refinements, suggest replies in chat for more languages, and a new Updates app to help organize team tasks.    

In May the Microsoft Teams app finally arrived in the Microsoft Store, giving Windows 10 users a new place to install the app for personal or work and school accounts. 

Windows 11 users can download the Teams app for work and school accounts from the Store, but not Teams for personal accounts. That’s because Windows 11 includes a built-in Teams chat app for consumers. As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley noted, this means there are now two Teams apps for consumers and work/school users rather than the one Microsoft was aiming for. 

Microsoft notes in its May 2022 Teams update that it introduced two new filters to improve video quality, including a ‘soft focus’ for a smoothing effect and an ‘adjust brightness’ filter for poorly lit scenarios. The filters can be set before joining a meeting and during the meeting via device settings. 

Video meeting organizers also get a new control to set Teams ‘together mode’ for all participants. Together mode places all participants’ faces in the same virtual room, like a dining room or auditorium. Meeting organizations can do this by checking the ‘Select Together Mode’ for everyone option after choosing a scene. But the feature is currently limited to Teams desktop app users. 

Folks who use virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365 and VMware have gained multi-window support, allowing them to create pop-out chats, meetings and calls in separate windows. These users also received new background blur effects. 

Meanwhile, VDI for Citrix gains a ‘give and take control’ function to allow presenters to hand control of shared content to another meeting participant. 

Microsoft has built on the new suggested replies feature in Teams chat to support 19 new languages beyond English. These include Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Korean, Czech, Danish, Turkish, and Polish.

Microsoft this month also announced a new app called Updates in Teams. As the name suggests, it lets employees create, submit and review their updates, check-ins and reports from a central place. The app is for those who regularly need to provide updates for moments like store openings, a facility inspection, a shift handoff, or incident reports. The app handles workflows between employees. Microsoft templates include maintenance request, shift handoff, daily update, facility inspection and more. It also offers a central place for colleagues to review updates as they are completed.    

Microsoft additionally expanded the availability of features to sensitive user groups, like GCC-High and DoD. These include ‘mirror my video’ to address scenarios where users presenting text see their text flipped. High-fidelity music mode for GCC-High allows users to prioritize non-speech content where intended. 

Additionally, live captions are now generally available in Teams on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix.