Microsoft is adding a “private line” feature to Teams that bypasses all organisational policies for calling.

The feature will be generally available in November and allows users to set up a private number to their Teams account that can be made available to a select group of colleagues who can then call the user directly.

Calling the private line number bypasses all organisational policies, which include delegates, admins, or assistants. Additionally, Teams will introduce a distinct ringtone and notification to alert the user that they’re being explicitly called by the private number. It will, for now, only support incoming calls and will not be usable for contacting others.

Microsoft’s roadmap entry for the feature reads:

With private line, users will be able to have a private second phone number that they can make available to a select set of callers to call them directly, bypassing delegates, admins, or assistants. Inbound calls to the private line will be distinguished by a unique notification and ringtone. The private line will support incoming calls only.”

The private line number will allow users to protect sensitive information that might need to be protected from coworkers within the organisation.

The feature will be available on the Desktop Teams app for GCC High, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant), GCC, and DoD customers. The roadmap contains no information on whether a private line for the Teams mobile app might be developed at some stage.

Teams’ October

Last week, Teams introduced automated monitoring to alert users about any significant meeting quality issues.

Consequently, admins can more efficiently monitor audio, video, and application sharing quality for upcoming meetings of certain users via telemetry parameters, such as latency, jitter, and hardware failures. When a quality problem is detected, admins are notified of the issue through channels or webhook notifications, which then produce further details.

Teams’ new personalisable, rule-based monitoring automatically updates admins in real time, enabling them to manage simultaneous meetings for multiple users.

Microsoft also announced a new update for Teams Premium to boost productivity and collaboration last week.

Among the new Teams Premium features are the addition of meeting “Chapters” and “Topics” to Intelligent Recap, expanded language support and new engagement analytics. Also being introduced are new webinar capabilities, such as customisable email communications. Meanwhile, admins receive new powers, including automatically enabling background blur for their organisation’s meetings and proactively monitoring meeting quality.

“The combination of intelligent productivity, engaging experiences, and advanced protection makes Teams Premium the smart place to work,” wrote Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President at Microsoft Teams, in an accompanying blog post. “And we’re continuing to innovate across the entire breadth of capabilities so employees can not only keep up but also thrive in the new era of collaboration.”

The new Microsoft Teams app is now generally available for Windows and Mac, producing the best client performance yet for users.

Teams 2.0 now has full feature parity for almost all features, including call queues, PSTN calling, and contextual search in chats and channels. General availability also introduced new features and enhancements, such as seamless cross-tenant communication and collaboration across multiple tenants and accounts.

In March, Microsoft launched the new Teams app in public preview, and it attracted attention for being twice as fast, with 50 percent less memory usage on Windows than the Teams classic client.



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