Microsoft Teams just gained several new features to improve communication

Microsoft Teams has a new update that makes it easier to communicate with people across platforms, roles, and locations. Several of the features have been in testing for a while, but are now generally available. Microsoft outlines all of the changes within the large update in a new post.

One of the new features is an integrated experience between Outlook and Teams. You can move an email conversation, including attachments, from Outlook into Teams with a new “Share to Teams” button. You can also move conversations from Teams into an email with a few button presses.

Microsoft Teams now supports targeted communication. You can assign people a tag and then @ mention anyone with that tag name in a post. This is similar to assigning roles within Discord and makes it much easier to reach a subset of people on your team. For example, you could have a group of people tagged to a specific project and @ mention them to communicate.

The new Files Experience in Microsoft Teams is powered by SharePoint. This feature was tested before today’s release but is now available worldwide. It allows you to sync files to your PC or Mac, see rich previews across over 320 file types, and perform other tasks that rely on deep information about your documents.

Video calling is also improved in this update. You can turn on live captions to have subtitles appear within Microsoft Teams meetings. Microsoft points out that this feature is useful for a wide range of people, including those that are deaf or hard of hearing, people with different levels of language proficiency, and people in loud locations.

There are quite a few other features available in the update, so it’s worth reading through the complete changelog from Microsoft to see what Teams is now capable of.