The keynote speech on day two of the Teams 10X 2022 summit featured tips and tricks to improve your Microsoft Teams experience.
Teams 10X is a virtual summit exploring the "tactics and techniques that are helping businesses worldwide use Teams. The two-day events hosted 70 speakers, 70+ meetings, 10,000+ attendees, and 98+ countries.
Stephen Rose, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, gave his keynote speech via Teams, sharing some little-known but useful tips on presenting in Teams, shared channels, transcription, webinars, and live events.
Rose began by sharing some behind-the-scenes insights into feature rollouts at Microsoft: "More GCC (Government Community Cloud) features?
"Yes, we'd love to, but GCC features are based upon how quickly the government can approve the features and run them through all of its testings.
"It is not us being slow; it is government. We send them as soon as the feature hits GA (general availability).
"We send it to them, but unfortunately, it takes them somewhere between 90 days to up to six months from the time it hits GA for them to go through, certify it, and approve it.
"Trust me; we would love to do it if it were not for the backlog that we see with the US government testing."
Present in Teams
Rose's first bit of advice centred around presenting in Teams. He told the audience not to share their screens when presenting as it creates a lag and decreases the quality, making it look "fuzzy".
The answer is to just do 'Present' in Teams. He recommended using Powerpoint Live or Excel Live to make your presentations.
Other presentation advice included clicking the eyeball symbol beside 'Stop Sharing' to prevent people from being able to view your entire presentation deck. Of course, there are times when you may want people to be able to do this.
There is also a translation button which you can turn on, allowing both speaker and viewer to select from one of 28 different languages.
Shared Channels
Teams has private channels, internal shared channels, and also Teams connect shared channels.
If you have a regular channel, anybody can join as it's public. People can search for it to find it through a private channel and invite others internally to that group.
Shared channels, however, leverage Azure B2B and it allows you to create a channel inside of it.
You can invite internal and external users to that channel, and only the people who have been invited can see the content inside.
It is a private walled-off space inside that channel that your external users can work in. This could be useful if you're doing a project with an outside company and you want to make sure that everything in there is secure.
Microsoft Loop
Rose was unashamedly "loopy for Loop", he told attendees. A lot of people have Loop but don't realise, but love it when they see it, Rose said.
Microsoft Loop is a new app which combines a flexible canvas with components that sync across Microsoft 365. Rose provided a live demonstration, showing how a list could be simultaneously shared and co-authored in the Teams tenant.
It is different to a shared document because that requires review and approval. Loop enables instant, live collaboration.
Loop can currently be used in Teams and Outlook. Soon it will be available in Word, Excel and Teams spaces, where all of the Loop conversations will be stored in the same place.
Microsoft Loop was first announced in 2021, which Microsoft dubbed "the next big breakthrough in Microsoft 365".
