Microsoft is announcing massive new updates for Microsoft Teams at Ignite this week. The company is ramping up Teams’ feature set with a bunch of new features and integrations that deepens its tie with the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft is giving users more controls over their channels, with a new option to create private channels within existing teams. These new private channels allow anyone to create a channel with specific members from the team, so they are hidden from everyone else that’s not part of the channel.

Microsoft Teams is also getting a new client for Linux. Since the Teams app is built on Electron, the new Linux app will offer a similar experience as the Windows and Mac clients on Linux. Microsoft says it will distribute native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats for the new Linux client. It will be launching later this year in a preview.

Elsewhere, Microsoft is introducing a bunch of new integrations for Teams. Outlook now lets you share an email conversation including its attachments right from the Outlook app to a Teams chat. You can also now access your Microsoft To Do tasks, as well as tasks from Team channels, Planner, and Outlook within a single, dedicated Tasks page within Teams. There’s also a new Yammer app that makes it easy to access all your Yammer data right from Teams.

And last but not least, Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams is now generally available, that means you can now collaborate in a digital canvas with others from your team. The experience is pretty powerful, considering you can just open it up right from the app and everyone else can simply join in whenever they want and contribute at the same time.

Microsoft Teams is getting a number of other new features, so if you are a Teams user, I would definitely check out the full list of announcements that involve a number of new enterprise-focused features as well.

Tagged with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, office, Outlook