Welcome to the August 2024 edition of the Microsoft Teams Tracker! Every month, I take a look at some of the latest and most impactful updates to the platform. Whether you’re an MS Teams user or someone integrating technology that complements it, this article is your go-to resource for staying informed. I’ll be highlighting a few key updates that I believe are most relevant to our industry. For a full, detailed list of changes, feel free to scroll down and explore the deck below.

Now, let’s dive into the standout Microsoft Teams updates for August 2024.

Updates for Town Halls

Teams has begun rolling out updates and new features for its “Town Halls” (formerly Live Events), which are designed for large-scale, interactive meetings and presentations.

The first update I’d like to point out is the intelligent meeting recap feature for unscheduled town halls for Android devices. This will allow these participants using Android devices to browse meeting recordings by speaker name and topic title. (Teams Premium users will be able to find this on the “Recap” tab in the Teams calendar event detail and in the chat.)

Also, participants can now send and see reactions in town halls — “like,” “love,” “applause” — you get the idea. This is all just to make the town hall a little more interactive and so the host can see what portions of the content the audience is enjoying the most.

Another update is that you can now export attendee questions as a .CSV file so you that the organizers are able to look and organize the data of the type of questions asked. Speaking of data, you can now share that data on the SharePoint site and send via email to attendees. This is already launched, by the way!

Microsoft Mesh

You might remember that I have mentioned Microsoft Mesh before — this is a cloud-based platform for collaboration in mixed reality. People in different locations, using different devices can leverage Microsoft 365 to collaborate in a shared immersive space. The newest update I have for you about this is that Mesh event hosts can now see attendees’ raised hands and reactions in all rooms in multi-room events. (A multi-room event is when a Mesh event exceeds 16 attendees — this aims to scale inclusive events to larger audiences.) This is available in Teams Premium and is currently in development.

General MS Teams Rooms Updates

The final few things I’d like to offer you are some general Teams Rooms updates:

• Ability to join Zoom Meetings with an ID and passcode from a Teams room on Android
• Ability for custom backgrounds for Teams Rooms on Android (enabled for IT admins)

As always, for the full list of updates for last month, check out the slide deck here: