At the beginning of March, due to the university's quarantine situation, we started to use MS Teams more intensively for online work and collaboration. During that time, several interesting features and other innovations appeared that helped improve video calls quality. What are they like?
The way meeting records are saved has changed for employees who have an Office 365 "A1" license assigned. If you start recording as an A1 licensed employee, the recording will be available for 21 days in the meeting chat, from where it can be downloaded, then deleted. Therefore, the recording will not be automatically saved to MS Stream.
To save the recording as before in MS Stream, you must have an A3 license assigned as an employee. You can request it here at it@muni.cz. If you want to verify what license you have, login here (tab Subscription). If you have an A1 license, you will only see "Office 365 A1 Plus for faculty" here (Figure 1). If you have an A3 license, you will also have "Microsoft 365 A3 for faculty" here (Figure 2).
Nothing changes for students, as they have an A3 license as standard.
In the question "Who can bypass the lobby?" The options "Only me" and "Everyone" are added. If you select "Only me", you approve all accesses to the meeting. With the "Everyone" option, unauthenticated users can connect using the link (without approval). It is enough when one of the participants starts the call.
To help you focus more on video calls, MS Teams offers the option to blur the background or insert your own image. If you would like to use this, click More Options (three dots) in the video call and select Show Background Effects (Figure 1).
You can then select the desired effect from the options in the right panel (Figure 2). Or an image from your device via "+ Add new" (Figure 3).
You can hands up using "Raise your hand" on the control panel in the meeting instead of asking a question directly for a smooth meeting. The meeting participant who is currently speaking will see a raised hand next to the person who clicked on it in the video call.
If the question is answered, you can click on the hand again to cancel the "hands up". In the presenter or organizer role, you can also cancel the "hands up" via Show participants and three dots.
As a meeting organizer, you can generate the participants' list during a video call by clicking View Participants. How? In the right People panel, click on three dots and select the Download attendance list - it will be downloaded in a csv (excel) file.
As a meeting organizer, you can change the permissions (roles) of participants during a call. Just click Show Attendees, click three dots in the right People panel, and select Manage Permissions. Then an Internet browser will open, where you can set the necessary permissions via Meeting Options.
You can now search contextually in the chat and in the team channel. Just open the relevant conversation where you want to search, press Ctrl + F and enter the search term.
A pleasant novelty is an increase in the maximum number of meeting participants up to 300 people.
As of 1 August 2024, the ESRI ArcGIS Desktop licence, which was previously available to all MU employees and students, will no longer be available at Masaryk University. As an alternative, we recommend switching to the more modern ArcGIS Pro, which offers a modern user interface, greater stability, more advanced features and better user support.
Do you want to know the news about Microsoft 365 tools used at the university? What changes and improvements await us in 2024? We have prepared a webinar for you, where we will not only summarize all the current information, but also look at tips on how to work (together) more securely and efficiently in Microsoft 365.
