Microsoft revamps Teams Calling: Here’s all you need to know

Microsoft has announced a major revamp of the calling features in Microsoft Teams.

The tech giant is making several enhancements to the Teams Calling service, including a more streamlined calling experience.

“We’re announcing several enhancements to Teams Calling that make it easier for organisations and their employees to strengthen connections and create new ones with just a quick call,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

Teams will now bring the dial pad, call history, voice-mail, contacts, and settings into a single location for a more streamlined calling experience.

The conferencing platform will further allow Teams Admins to make OneDrive or SharePoint the default recording storage location, in lieu of Stream.

“This new capability provides powerful capabilities such as sharing with external guests, quicker access to transcripts, and greater storage capacity,” Microsoft said.

Spam detection

Microsoft is also adding new spam, detection capabilities to calling on Teams. Teams will identify potential spam calls and digitally attest outgoing calls to prevent these calls from being rejected by external recipients, Microsoft said.

Starting in early 2021, Teams will add new features such as shifting calls between mobile and desktop and allowing a low-data mode for users.

Users will be able to adjust their settings in Teams “to cap the amount of data that will be used during video calls and establish different settings based on network availability (cellular, Wi-Fi, or always),” it said.

Users will also be to merge different one to one calls together.

Other features include enhanced reverse number look-up and CarPlay support for Teams Calling.

“With automatic reverse number look-up, you’ll see the name of the caller at the time they’re calling and in your activity feed and voicemail,” explained Microsoft.

CarPlay will enable users to the built-in controls of their vehicle to operate Teams, including using Siri to place and answer calls.

Features for businesses

Teams will also add new features for businesses and for Microsoft’s Teams device ecosystem. New Teams feature for businesses includes collaborative calling, certified contact centre solutions and call transfer ring-back.

The collaborative calling feature enables teams “to integrate call queues into a specific channel, allowing for collaboration and information sharing before, during, and after the call.”

“Starting in early 2021, Teams users will have the option to create new channels that are voice-enabled, to start using this feature in preview,” Microsoft said.

The tech giant will also allow contact centre providers to apply for Microsoft certification of their solutions.

The call transfer ring back feature will enable a call ring back to the person making the call transfer in case the transfer recipient does not answer the call.