Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Teams

“Meetings are still consuming the lion’s share of our time, up over 250% per week on average for a Teams user since the start of the pandemic. Ad hoc chats are on the rise as the average user is sending 30% more chats each week than before. We need to create new norms to reduce time spent in meetings and empower people to hit the off switch,” said Nicole Herskowitz, vice president, Microsoft Teams, during the Microsoft keynote at Enterprise Connect.

Reducing time and promoting efficiency was what Microsoft hoped to convey in unveiling a Teams lineup of products at Enterprise Connect this week.

During their keynote, Microsoft Teams representatives highlighted Operator Connect Mobile, a single SIM-enabled number for Teams Phone that serves as a desk phone number, mobile number and Teams number. No longer will individuals have to go to an app to make a call. The solution is both device and network-agnostic. Operator Connect Mobile will be coming to mobile operators shortly, Microsoft Teams announced at the conference.

Ninety percent of Fortune 500 customers today use Teams Phone for their internal communication and collaboration needs. One of the most asked-for features from users is to be able to customize and manage their call history. Microsoft announced this feature will be available next quarter.

Privacy is also a concern for customers. Microsoft Teams officials said they were happy to share that Teams calls will support full end-to-end encryption starting next quarter across all the endpoints.

Teams Connect share channels are coming to public preview this month. Users will be able to invite individuals or and entire team to a shared channel. These can either be from the user’s organization or from another organization that uses Azure AD. Once added to a shared channel, external users can access the channel right from their own Teams account without having to switch organizations, Microsoft said.

The company also announced Cameo, which overlays a Team’s video feed on a PowerPoint presentation. An integrated Cameo and PowerPoint recording studio experience will be available next quarter, making the dream of asynchronous presentations a reality.

In addition, the company announced speaker coach for Teams, which uses AI-based nudges to help speakers deliver more impactful presentations. For example, letting a user know when they’re speaking too fast or interrupting someone. It even reminds users to check in with their audience.

Lastly, Microsoft Teams said its language interpretation tool will use live interpreters to convert what users say into another language in near real time. Users can select up to 16 source and target language combinations. This will be available at the end of March.