The newest editions to the endless capabilities of Microsoft 365 Teams are aimed towards boosting the productivity of the teams while promoting inclusion. Microsoft Teams now has a gaming feature that helps foster team building by making everyone feel engaged and included. Microsoft Teams is now more accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing or for anyone who uses sign language. The users can also send scheduled messages at just the right time through Teams, and more. Listed below are the recent updates to Microsoft 365 Teams.

Foster team building, collaboration, and morale through play in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft introduced the “Games for Work App” for Microsoft Teams this month which allows co-workers to collaborate and play games. This application is developed by Microsoft Casual Games, an Xbox Games Studio as an addition to Microsoft Teams to break down barriers and foster team building.

The Games for Work app integrates directly into your workflow and can be added to any Microsoft Teams meeting. It has a selection of popular, interactive, multiplayer games like Microsoft Minesweeper, IceBreakers, Solitaire, and Wordament. This application is now available for Microsoft Teams Enterprise customers.

Send messages without disrupting your colleagues’ non-work hours

The new “schedule send” in Microsoft Teams will let you manually select a future date or time to send a chat message to people in your organization, just like in Microsoft Outlook. It helps with fostering inclusive culture by respecting boundaries. The sender can schedule a message by either selecting and holding or right clicking the send button. It helps the sender stay in control of the chat while not disrupting the recipients’ non-work hours. The schedule Send feature is now generally available for commercial Teams users.

Keep interpreters and other sign language users visible in meetings

In order to help signers—people who are deaf or hard of hearing, interpreters and others who use sign language, Sign Language View, a new meeting experience in Microsoft Teams is created. This will help the signers by keeping one another prioritized on centre stage and in a consistent location throughout the meeting. This view will provide the signers in the meeting with a center stage and thereby visibility throughout the meeting. The video streams that are prioritized will appear at the right aspect ratio and at the highest available quality. Similar to pinning and captioning, this view is local and will not affect the viewing experience of other participants in the meeting. The sign language view can be enabled either in a particular meeting or set up in such a way that it persists across all the meetings.

The sign language view will roll out to general availability for Teams desktop and web clients in the coming weeks and is now only available in preview.

Guide discussions by having everyone follow your view in Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is a free-form, digital canvas where people, content, and ideas come together. Whiteboard integration in Microsoft Teams meetings is powered by the Whiteboard web app, which lets Teams meeting participants draw, sketch, and write together on a shared digital canvas. Meeting facilitators using the follow feature on Whiteboard can now lead to more engaging, visually guided discussions. The follow feature allows meeting facilitators to bring everyone else on the whiteboard to their location and have them follow the facilitator’s view. A participant initially following a facilitator can pause their view of the whiteboard at any time to edit or explore the whiteboard on their own, and then they can easily resume following the facilitator when they’re ready.

This feature lets the facilitator focus the attention on the key parts of the presentation and the participants will no longer feel overwhelmed without guidance. This feature is expected to be available to Teams enterprise customers at the end of this calendar year.