This Microsoft Teams update will help you cut through all the nonsense

Finding the right chats in Microsoft Teams will soon be a lot easier thanks to a new update that looks to help users focus better.

The video conferencing tool is adding new filters within the Chat app on Teams that will remove meeting chats and chats with bots, giving users a much more streamlined look at their conversations.

According to the official Microsoft 365 roadmap entry, the filter will work across group chats as well as one on one conversations, helping users stay focused on the messages that matter.

Microsoft Teams chat filters

The feature is still in development, but the roadmap has noted a launch date of March 2022, meaning it should arrive in the next few weeks, adding it will be available to all Microsoft Teams users across web and Mac devices.

Microsoft has been working hard to make Teams an integral part of workers’ everyday lives, adding a wealth of new features and updates to the platform to encourage hybrid working. 

This includes the ability to pin messages in Microsoft Teams, much like in Slack or Telegram, allowing users to attach a specific message to the top of the channel so that it’s always visible to other participants, regardless of the number of messages that came afterwards.

The most recent Microsoft financial reports found that Teams now boasts over 270 million monthly active users (MAUs), up from the 250 million MAUs that the company reported just six months ago.

And recent data collected by software firm StarLeaf found almost all (97%) businesses say that video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Webex and Microsoft Teams are now essential to their operations. More than half (57%) of businesses surveyed said their company would not be able to operate for more than an hour without access to their communications tools, while 27% admitted they would struggle to function for even 30 minutes.