Welcome to our fourth instalment of What’s new in Microsoft 365 at UVic for May 2021!

Microsoft Teams

Breakout room time limit

Organizers can now set a timer for Breakout rooms from the Breakout Room settings. Once the timer has expired, rooms will automatically close, and participants will return to the main meeting. Learn more about using Breakout rooms in Teams here.

 

Updated settings for attendees videos

There are three new ways that you can now manage your attendees’ camera. First, meeting attendees are able to turn their camera on or off to share video by default. You can also configure to have all attendees’ camera disabled by setting Enable camera for attendees to Off from the Meeting Options web page before the meeting. Next, once this new setting is turned Off, you can also reverse this setting during the meeting to allow all attendees to turn their camera on. Finally, you can also enable or disable the camera for individual attendees. Note that these settings do not automatically turn on attendees’ camera or affect presenters and meeting organizers.

 

Improved participant list

 

The participant list is now broken out into three sections: Lobby, Presenters, and Attendees. For Lobby, you can now review the full list of people waiting before admitting them all into the meeting. Attendees are sorted in alphabetical order and those who raise their hands are elevated to the top of the participant list.

 

PowerPoint presenter view

Once you select a PowerPoint file from the Teams Share Tray, Presenter View is opened automatically. You can see the current slide, the slide notes, and a thumbnail strip of all the slides in the deck for easy ad-hoc slide navigation.  The view you see as the presenter is yours only.  If there are multiple presenters, the next presenter can select ‘Take control’ to switch the presenter view to themselves.

 

New Content Sharing Tray

The share tray has a new look! It allows you to share everything you could in the old share tray, the only difference is the form factor and user experience of finding the content you need to share.

 

 

Other Microsoft 365 applications

 

New Undo and Redo arrows in Whiteboard in Teams

 

Whiteboards shared in a Teams meeting have another new feature- undo and redo arrows.