Since the pandemic accelerated the move to remote or hybrid work in 2020, we’ve all gotten more familiar with collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. In fact, statistics show an increase in Teams users from just 20 million in 2019 to more than 270 million in 2022.
While using Teams for chat or video conferencing may be second nature at this point, many people and organizations aren’t taking full advantage of advanced Microsoft Teams Features. If you’re a business that’s new to using Microsoft Teams, or if you just want to learn more about all what this powerful platform really has to offer, we have you covered. We’ve compiled a list of advanced features that you might not be aware of to help you level up your current usage of Teams.
Microsoft Teams advanced features
What are “advanced features” of Microsoft Teams?
Many of us have experience using Teams to hold video meetings or send messages to our coworkers. But to leverage the full power of Teams, you need to go above and beyond to familiarize yourself with these advanced features. Our top picks for features to try are:
- Centralized document management
- Automated workflows
- Avatars
- Live transcription
- Speaker coach
- Reusable whiteboards
- Workload management
- Team-wide alerts
- Filters
- Deleting chats
- Customizable sidebar
- Secure collaboration
- Integrations
This list includes Microsoft Teams new features as well as some old favorites. Let’s dig into the details of each one.
1. Centralized document management for a team
Your Teams site is more than just a place for communication. Take advantage of Teams’ centralized document management for your team by customizing your site for file storage and sharing. Combining your use of OneDrive and SharePoint with Teams can create a place for all your documents, contacts, tasks, calendars, and OneNote notebooks to live. Organize your files into document libraries, create lists to organize data, organize sites into hubs, and more.
2. Automated workflows
Tired of creating the same tasks for yourself or your team over and over? Create flows that automate those repetitive tasks with Power Automate. The Power Automate app allows you to create and manage workflows, streamline your approval process, and even use a bot to trigger scheduled flows, all within Teams.
3. Avatars
One of the newest advanced Microsoft Teams features on our list is avatars. Teams avatars were released in public preview in March 2023 and started rolling out to everyone in May.
The avatar feature lets you create a digital version of yourself that can appear on camera for a meeting. You can customize the avatar’s appearance, wardrobe, headwear, and accessories. Avatars are animated to match your voice, giving a more personal feel to meetings without the need to turn on your camera.
4. Live transcription
Teams can generate a transcription of your meeting in real time. The transcript appears beside the meeting video and includes the speaker's name unless they choose to hide it.
This feature makes meetings more accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, non-native speakers, and people joining the meeting from noisy environments. It’s also a valuable tool if you missed a meeting or want to review what was discussed. After the meeting ends, the transcript will post to the meeting chat.
If you have meetings in more than one language, you can switch your live transcription language on Teams. Just click the caption settings (…) to the right of the captions to select a language.
5. Speaker Coach
Are you looking to improve your presentation skills? Maybe banish the “ums” from your vocabulary or work on your speaking speed. Microsoft Teams Speaker Coach can help.
Speaker Coach is another fairly new Microsoft Teams feature, although it was previously available under the name “Presenter Coach” in PowerPoint. To use it, start your meeting and go to More (…). Under “Language and Speech” select “Turn on Speaker Coach.”
After your meeting, Speaker Coach will send a report that only you can see. The report evaluates your presentation based on metrics like speaking pace, intonation, repetitive language, and more.
6. Reusable whiteboards
Every Teams meeting has a dedicated whiteboard that meeting participants can use to sketch out ideas, make lists, share images and videos, and more. The whiteboard is saved as a .whiteboard file on OneDrive so you can access it even after the meeting.
You can also reuse your whiteboards in new meetings. While in your meeting, click “Share” and select “Microsoft Whiteboard.” This will automatically create a new whiteboard. If you want to share an existing one instead, click the Home icon to see all of your saved whiteboards.
One lesser-known feature of whiteboards is Follow. Follow lets you invite whiteboard collaborators to follow your point of view as you move around the board. To do this, click your profile icon in the top right corner of the screen and select “Everyone follow me.” Participants will receive an invite to follow your view. If no response is received after 20 seconds, they’ll automatically start following you.
7. Workload management
If you’re already assigning your team tasks, take advantage of Planner for task management. Start by creating a team channel and then associate a specific planner with it. Your team members can track tasks, receive notifications for new tasks, and more with this plugin.
8. Team-wide alerts
Don’t want to bog down your entire team with another company-wide email? Try creating a channel for that in Teams instead. Team-wide alerts allow you to notify your team of important changes, updates, or news instantly without getting lost in their inbox. Also, it’s easier for your team to refer back to these updates when they’re all in one centralized channel in Teams rather than searching through their cluttered inbox.
9. Filters
Sometimes you want to make a few tweaks to the appearance of your Teams video. Teams has had two basic filters, Adjust Brightness and Soft Focus, for a while.
Earlier this year, Microsoft rolled out a set of newer, more advanced Teams filters. You can find these filters under “Video Effects.” The filters include various visual effects like animated frames and hue changes and can help you personalize your video stream.
You can also now use 20+ of the most popular Snapchat Lenses in Teams (just in case your meeting calls for an animal on your head or sparkles dancing in the background.)
10. Deleting chats
This may not be the showiest advanced feature in Teams, but it’s useful for people who want to declutter their list of Teams chats. To delete a chat, either right click the chat or click the (…) next to the chat and select “Delete chat.”
Other chat participants will still be able to see the chat. Deleted chats are removed from all your devices and are no longer searchable.
11. Customizable sidebar
When you open Microsoft Teams, you’ll see a number of icons in the sidebar for things like Chat, Calls, Files, and more. Don’t like the order of the apps in your sidebar? Just drag and drop to re-arrange them.
Here’s another helpful trick: say you want to quickly navigate to “Calendar,” which is the 4th icon on your sidebar. You can get there by using the shortcut CTRL+A+4.
12. Secure collaboration with external users
Teams allows you to invite external users like customers, vendors, or suppliers to join channels and chats, giving them the ability to securely collaborate with you in real time instead of over email. Anyone with an email account (business or personal) can be invited to your organization and admins can control what features these guests have access to. All Office 365 programs, including Teams, meet a variety of security compliance standards, like ISO 27001, HIPPA, and SOC 2, so you can rest assured that your site will remain protected even when collaborating with external users.
13. Integrations
Your business likely uses more than just Office 365 products to function. Take advantage of the full Teams Store to download useful integrations with the tech you’re already using. The Emergent Software team utilizes many of these integrations to streamline our daily processes with plugins for Smartsheet, Power BI, OpsGenie, and Polly. Integrating the tools you already use into Teams can help to centralize your day-to-day work so you spend less time jumping around from platform to platform and work all in one place.
As you can see, Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform that is built for more than just the basics. Let our team of experts help you and your team unlock the potential this tool has to transform your work.
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