Teams will soon suggest start times for users scheduling meetings across different time zones by syncing with each participant’s location.

The new feature intends to simplify organising meetings across various time zones and will also include further suggestions to make the process more time-efficient and reduce potential confusion.

The 365 Roadmap wrote:

When scheduling a meeting with people from different time-zones, the user will be prompted with suggested start times and additional insights that correspond to the participants respective time zone, ensuring a more suitable time for all meeting participants.”

In practice, the feature will mean Teams users will no longer have to double-check the timezones of colleagues or clients when scheduling the meeting, or a user losing track of when the meeting was supposed to occur. Its automatic syncing and informed suggestions should also save users’ time from negotiating which time would best work as a compromise over email or messaging.

“Additional insights that correspond to the participant’s respective time zone” potentially means Teams will also flag local holidays to simplify meeting scheduling further.

The feature will roll out in general availability for Web and Desktop in July.

Microsoft’s Plan to Enhance International Meetings

This time zone syncing feature maintains Microsoft’s interest in enhancing international meeting experiences, perhaps best illustrated by improving its live translation capabilities.

Live translation in Teams was first revealed last year when Microsoft partnered with the Welsh Government to offer live human translation services.

At the time, designated interpreters would translate during scheduled Teams meetings, and attendees could listen in real-time in a language of their choosing and switch languages during the meeting.

In 2022, Microsoft announced its intelligent message translation for Teams chat on mobile devices. This enabled iOS and Android users to translate a chat message into their preferred language. Microsoft stated these services would foster better collaboration between users who speak different native languages.

The launch of Teams Premium earlier this year saw Microsoft expand its live translation capabilities powered by its partnership with OpenAI. The feature gives users real-time translations from 40 spoken languages in caption form.

Meeting participants could read captions in their language, while only the meeting organiser needs a Teams Premium licence for all attendees to use the service.

Initially only available on PCs and Macs, Microsoft recently announced that Teams’ function of Teams’ating live captions would be added to mobile devices in August.

In practice, this means that when mobile users start up a meeting, they can choose live captions in the language of their choice. The new feature will be exclusive to Teams Premium.

Recent Quality of Life Improvements from Teams

It’s been a busy week so far for Teams updates, especially with Infocomm 2023 occurring.

Several new Teams cameras were initially announced at Microsoft Ignite in October 2022 and are now soon to be released for customer preview or general availability, including the Cloud IntelliFrame and the SmartVision 60.

New collaboration features include “Front Row”, which turns individual backgrounds into shared backgrounds and makes each video feed a uniform size so that attendees appear life-sized to participants. Spatial audio will track video gallery speakers more organically and be added to online meetings to enhance remote meeting experiences.

UC Today’s Rob Scott discussed the latest updates to Microsoft Teams with Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud, Tom Arbuthnot.

This week, collaborative notes for Teams meetings was also available in public preview. The new feature allows meeting attendees to work together by taking notes, forming agendas, and creating action items.

This updated version of Teams meeting notes automatically syncs edits to the notes across all attendee devices, providing a more seamless collaborative experience. Attendees are not restricted to a single app as collaborative notes will be immediately updated whether they are shared in Teams, Outlook, Loop, Word for Web, or Whiteboard.

Earlier this month, Teams introduced its “most significant set of updates to the free version of Microsoft Teams since December 2022”, according to its announcement, in introducing its Communities feature to Windows 11.

Its Community update allows users to produce groups for organising events and keeping colleagues up to date with information. New features added to the Communities section include new camera features and the ability to search for and join public Communities.

The Communities for Teams feature was initially announced last December but was previously only available on Teams for iOS and Android.



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