I had a pleasure to visit Aberdeen, Scotland last week and speak at Scottish Summit 2024 community event. This marks my fourth in-person Scottish Summit ( 3 x the actual Summit in Scotland and one Summit on Tour at Manchester, England) where I have spoken at. It is a wonderful conference to come back to, as the vibe is great and organizers put effort to create the event that has fun, knowledge, expertise and everyone is welcome. Of course I do love to visit Scotland for other reasons also, as it gives me a great chance to enjoy the view there and make a visit to a whisky distillery – and in Scotland you can find one almost nearby everywhere. But the main focus is the event and the highlight is delivering my session to the people in the room.

Before going to my session, I have to highlight the opening keynote by Scott Hanselman, and the closing keynote by Dona Sarkar. Both were extremely good, filled with great information and also fun! That made them really captivating to follow and listen. And from those, we know more about the LLM, Copilot and that the Purview and (ir)Responsible AI are always watching! Pay attention to Scottish Summit YouTube, I think keynotes might show up there later.

This time, my topic was Supercharging Your Teams Meetings Game.

As the name implies, I was showing what can be done in Teams Meetings and how its vast number of features can be utilized to make your meetings better, more productive or just more versatile. And since it is me, we were talking about live demos showing various capabilities – and it looked like that everyone who attended my session learned something new. I am a bit proud about that, as there were fellow MVPs in the room who are also heavy Teams users and know lots of its features.

I started with a bit of building blocks, that all bring in features you can use in Teams meetings. Naturally the Teams Core is what most of the people use, and there are great capabilities already in there. But adding Teams Premium you can get to the next level quite easily (assuming you do need those features often enough), and adding Microsoft 365 Copilot you get the AI assistant to your meetings who can help (today) to create meeting notes, answer questions about the meetings and when used cleverly it can help you big time. And we haven’t yet seen the Copilot as a meeting participant (announced at Build 2024), which will be adding even more to its usefulness. Finally adding other meeting add-ons and Copilot for Sales you get pinpointed benefits. All these together can power up your meetings quite a lot. However, this doesn’t mean that you will be just buying everything and thinking it will make your meetings perfect.. Nope. You need to be aware what and where to use, in which kind of meetings to be able to select perfect building blocks to your meeting instance to match your needs. Don’t just add everything on, because it is there..

Here is a portion of demos I was showing in the Scottish Summit 2024. Some of these are not new, but something I have noticed people don’t really know about it – or don’t remember to use it:

Meeting Agendas ( Loop components). Yes, you do want to easily editable meeting agendas & notes. Start sharing the awareness about these, as Loop is the thing and we will be Looping a lot more every month.

Meeting Theme (Teams Premium). Yes, you can brand your meetings, all it takes is that the meeting organizer has the Teams Premium license and everyone in the meeting can enjoy about the brand.

Green Room. This is very useful if you want presenters to meet before the meeting and do sound checks, test sharing etc. This is in Teams Core, and you find it in meeting options.

Live Captions with spoken language captions. Yes, in Teams Core.

Voice Isolation (Teams Core). Once you create your voice profile with Teams (via Settings / Recognition), you can turn on voice isolation which drops off other voices but your own. For example if you are in a busy cafe or office, people online won’t be hearing other speaking – only you. Teams Core. Btw, this voice enrollment will be on by default starting January 2025. Now admins need to turn it on, but if you don’t want it on: admins should set up the new policy to turn it off.

Live Translation (Teams Premium). It always creates an effect, when I speak in Finnish and audience can read subtitles in English. No, not perfect but many multi-national/cultural organizations benefit of this!

PowerPoint Live. Not really something new, but I have seen too many screen shares to show a PowerPoint presentation.. It is a really good one, and in Teams Core. Cameo (yes, it is still there!), slide translations, zooming, inking and more..

Did you knew you can add a Shared Display, that displays the content and participants (or meeting chat) – and it automatically uses the second display to show it? I admit, the automatic use of the second screen was a surprise to me as well – everyone learned something during my session! (including me)

Remember the meeting Agenda? During the meeting you can open it via Notes. And you can also add these notes to a Loop Workspace via … menu. That way you can organize project meeting notes to a same place where team members can find them.

There are new Meeting Options also, some of these require Teams Premium.

Whiteboard and annotating the screen during the meeting. You may want to check these out. Yes, there are also the Copilot in Whiteboard to help you out to facilitating workshops.

Microsoft Mesh. You can use Mesh in Teams Core to change your meeting to immersive 3D experience – just change the view! There are already a new scene to use ( Workshop) and soon there will be an another one. Mesh is easy to use, and the change of view can help to boost up some of your meetings. Don’t try to use Mesh for every meeting – it will just fail. But when your focus is more on talking, ideating, small group talks, or just want a new view.. Mesh can be the feature you want to use. No, you don’t need a headset – I run demos from my laptop screen directly. There are great features like a personal stage, that can bring the shared content close to you – no matter where in the space you are.

And that wasn’t all! If you attended, you know what else was there. I did run a bit out of time a bit as I was in the flow of showing and talking the fun you can do with Teams meetings, so I had to wrap up the session quite fast. 45 mins goes so fast when having fun.

As I anticipated I would not have time to show these slides during my session, I intended these as takeaways for attendees, to have something to take with them and start to think how to supercharge their Teams meetings when they get back to work from the Summit.

Then I did share a few selected items from the roadmap, related to Teams meetings. And I just noticed that I did have the enrollment defaulting to on at two slides. It is a big deal to some organizations to be aware about this change!

And as usual.. Teams roadmaps do live. So, it won’t be the first nor last time when features get a new estimate at the roadmap. Keep in the mind, that the roadmap schedule is just the best estimate, team has at the moment, when the feature will be rolled out. So, it can change but it is still a good indication of what is in the radar.

Published by Vesa Nopanen

Vesa “Vesku” Nopanen, Principal Consultant and Microsoft MVP (M365 and AI Platform) working on Future Work at Sulava.

I work, blog and speak about Future Work : AI, Microsoft 365, Copilot, Microsoft Mesh, Metaverse, and other services & platforms in the cloud connecting digital and physical and people together.

I have about 30 years of experience in IT business on multiple industries, domains, and roles.
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