Nov 20 2023
Digital Workspace

Microsoft Ignite 2023: Experts Explain Teams Optimization

In an interactive Microsoft Ignite session, Microsoft Teams product experts spoke on best practices for implementation.

In a highly interactive panel at this year’s Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Teams product experts spoke with attending IT leaders about how to best configure, implement and manage Microsoft Teams. The session, titled “Optimizing your Microsoft Teams environment,” featured four Microsoft Teams experts:

  • Jamie Stark, principal group product manager
  • Casandra Marrero, senior product marketing manager
  • John Gruszczyk, senior product marketing manager
  • Mansoor Malik, principal group product manager

The four spoke about all things Teams, including Teams Phone, emergency calling with E911, meetings, chat and collaboration, and Teams Premium. They shared strategies to help organizations best optimize Teams for their environment.

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Dynamic Emergency Calling and Remote Work

Establishing emergency calling within Teams gives dispatchers a precise location of every user in an environment, down to the floor of the building where the user is located and even the particular location on that floor, depending on the size of the organization. But as users and employees continue to work off-premises, concerns arise about what happens to those who use E911 off-premises; will dispatchers know where they are when they call?

Microsoft’s Jamie Start spoke on this at the Ignite session, explaining that organizations need another facility in which the user enters his or her current location, which is sent to emergency services. If the user-entered information is ambiguous, emergency services can then triage the call and figure out the user’s exact location.

Intelligent Meeting Recap, Transcripts and Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft’s John Gruszczyk announced that intelligent meeting recap, an AI tool that automatically produces an overview of a meeting, will be included in both Microsoft Copilot and Teams Premium’s offerings. Additionally, users can use Copilot in Teams meetings without a transcript to give meeting organizers more control over meeting data. According to a Microsoft blog, “when enabled without transcription, you can ask Copilot any question during the meeting, and after the meeting ends no transcript or Copilot interactions will be retained. Since no transcript is retained after the meeting, neither intelligent recap nor Copilot will be available after the meeting.”

Gruszczyk noted that using Copilot without transcription is not yet available with intelligent meeting recap, but that’s where he would like the program to move next.

“We want to standardize on this idea of being able to not use the transcript to generate the Intelligent meeting recap, but we don't have a timeline on that yet,” he said.

Microsoft’s Mansoor Malik said Microsoft is making efforts to improve the quality of the transcripts that it produces in Teams meetings. Microsoft is also looking to expand intelligent meeting recap to include additional languages, with Malik explaining that it’s currently rolling out Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese capabilities.

LEARN MORE: How Microsoft Copilot can facilitate AI-powered organizations.

Optimizing Teams to Avoid Sprawl

Gruszczyk spoke of the challenges of “Teams sprawl,” which is when there is an uncontrolled increase in irrelevant data and the number of teams in an organization’s Teams environment. This happens when there is a lack of governance around who can create teams and how to manage data.

While there isn’t a way to automatically fix Teams sprawl,  Gruszczyk said there are a few strategies organizations can employ, including conducting guest access hygiene reviews, implementing expiration policies, establishing naming conventions, limiting who can create teams and restricting who is able to add guests.

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