Microsoft Claims It’s Easier To ‘Triage’ Chats On New Teams – ChannelNews
Microsoft is touting a number of improvements to its Microsoft Teams chat and meetings service that will make it easier for users to sort and categorize chats to help organizations respond more quickly to support tickets or other pressing requests.
Teams has enjoyed explosive growth since the start of the pandemic as the number of users has soared amid widespread adoption of remote working. It has quickly become an essential part of many organizations’ everyday workflows, as it offers a convenient, consolidated platform for communication and collaboration, while also facilitating tasks and integrating seamlessly with other productivity software in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Microsoft has made its Teams platform much more feature-rich to cope with its surging adoption rate, by adding an increasing number of features and functionality. This includes adding functionality that could potentially help the platform remain a primary platform for organizations as more staff return to workplaces or operate a hybrid model. However, the increased usage is adding significant complexity and making the Teams interface even more cluttered.
In order to combat the growing complexity of Teams, Microsoft has introduced new tools that make it easier for teams to get more value from its communications hub.
As a result, it will be much easier for teams to keep track of, respond to, and ultimately, triage urgent support requests or messages, according to Microsoft.
For starters, Microsoft has made some updates to its chat notifications. It has added the ability to filter by sender, subject, keywords, or message type to make it much easier to find the right messages.
Microsoft has also made it much easier for teams to add context to messages and organize their chat conversations. Users can add a “conversation topic” that can then be used to categorize and group chats in one view.
Organizations will then be able to find all the conversations tagged with a certain conversation topic. “Add your own topic to chats to get organized,” says a Microsoft blog post. “Topics will be grouped at the top of your chat list and appear in your recent list, making it easy to navigate all of your urgent conversations. We hope these changes will help you stay more on top of your work!”
The other improvements include features like chat reactions, improved message sharing, and expanded emoji capabilities, according to the vendor.
In terms of its Teams meeting function, Microsoft has implemented several enhancements that also add to its usability.
Microsoft’s recently announced integration of Microsoft Loop components with Teams allows meeting participants to work on projects in real time in Teams and see those changes reflect in the other applications and documents where they are embedded. The result is a truly collaborative approach to teamwork, even when participants are dispersed across the globe.
This addition helps to cement Teams as a crucial aspect of the enterprise ecosystem for organizations across multiple sectors, and comes at a time when many firms are investing significant funds and time in expanding the use of cloud and collaborative tools.
According to a recent analysis by Synergy Research Group, worldwide spending on enterprise cloud services rose by 37 percent year-over-year during the first quarter of 2022. Microsoft’s continued investment in its Teams platform and efforts to bolster its features have played an important role in driving that demand.
