April-May developments
As part of ongoing enhancements in April and May, Microsoft Teams has introduced several new features and improvements across meetings, webinars, and town halls. Among these updates is a notable enhancement for visual branding in meetings.
Visual branding, the latest update, allows IT administrators to upload up to five custom brand themes to a single customisation policy within the Teams Admin Centre, allowing meeting organisers to select from available themes when scheduling meetings.
‘Meeting chats’ is a new feature in the Teams admin area that lets administrators manage who can send messages during and after meetings. Admins can set the ‘Meeting only’ option to prevent participants from sending messages in the meeting chat before or after the meeting.
Microsoft Teams has an option for organisations with information barrier policies that can now host meetings involving participants with conflicting policies, as long as a designated moderator is present. Attendees will stay in the lobby until the moderator joins, unless lobby bypass is enabled. Additionally, users can now edit their display names during meetings, giving them more control over how they appear to others.
Teams recently introduced intelligent recap alerts for calls from chat and ‘Meet Now’ sessions.. These appear in the Activity feed and as banner alerts, with settings to control where and when notifications are shown. Finally, Teams Rooms on Windows now support live transcription controls, allowing in-room participants to start, stop, and manage real-time transcriptions. These include speaker names (when voice profiles are used), timestamps, and options for showing translated and original transcripts side by side.
The new Q&A tool in Microsoft Teams helps organisers, co-organisers, and presenters manage live questions during town halls, webinars, and training. Moderation keeps discussions focused by allowing questions to be reviewed before posting.
Zoom now provides visual indicators in the Zoom Rooms participant list to show who is currently sharing their screen. The new update makes it easier for attendees to access session recordings after the event. When attendees receive post-event emails with recording links, clicking the Watch Recording button now takes them directly to the video recording, skipping the event lobby, for single and recurring sessions.
Zoom introduced an option for hosts organising hybrid and in-person events: the ability to add physical location details during event setup. Once added, the location automatically appears in email invitations and on the event detail page, ensuring attendees have all the information they need.
Are you planning an online meeting or event and need urgent advice?
Our ConfTech Help desk provides countries and organisations with immediate advice on how to organise and run online meetings and events. Get in touch with us at conftech@diplomacy.edu.
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