Microsoft Teams: Chat for guests will be muted, and “raise hand” will be improved

Microsoft’s communication software ‘Teams‘ has become an integral part of everyday office life and is used by many on a daily basis. The interest in new features is therefore correspondingly high. And these will be replenished in the near future.

The importance of teams for the Redmond company is apparent from the fact that new functionalities are regularly added to the service. More new features will be added soon, as seen in the entries in the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

Guests can be banned from chat

The first certainly useful innovation concerns the participation of guests in meetings. These of course do not have the same rights as regular participants and this can also be managed by administrators accordingly. And those responsible for this now have another tool. In the future, admins can revoke the right to write and see chat messages from anonymous and unauthenticated users in Teams. In concrete terms, this means that you can still participate in a meeting, but in an even more passive role.

There are certainly several reasons for this: On the one hand, the data of the active participants must be protected, in chats confidential information is often shared that a “spectator” is not allowed or allowed to see. On the other hand, this is probably also intended as a kind of troll protection, anonymous participants should not cause any nuisance and unrest if possible.

Raise your hand at the touch of a button

The second new function concerns the already available “raise hand” function. This is already a signal that you want to say something and this is now even easier. Because with hardware that has dedicated team buttons, you can activate “raise hand” by holding down the corresponding button – that’s a small, but certainly nice improvement in comfort.