Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly: Teams will add a "meet now" feature and more

Welcome back to our weekly look back at what's been added to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website. This week is a bit different in that some of the new entries have also been revealed in a Microsoft 365 blog post a few days ago along with a press release for Teams earlier this week.

That included reveals of a new Teams app called Queues that lets users take customer calls in Teams that's coming in June along with a way to interact with Microsoft's Copilot in the new Outlook for Windows and on the web in April.

However, there are some other entries on the roadmap site that are all new. One of them is a new feature coming to Teams for the desktop in May called Meet Now:

Start a huddle with you colleagues using meet now in group chat. Meet now in group chat is a ringless experience designed to enable ad-hoc, real-time communication with your team in a hybrid environment.

Another new entry for Teams on the desktop in May is called Programmatic Desktop Sharing:

We are introducing programmatic desktop sharing, which allows developers to enable screensharing specific pieces of app content. Unlike the currently existing share to stage functionality, meeting participants cannot interact with the shared app; they have a view-only mode of the presenter's app screen similar to screen sharing, but in one click. The shared content is also automatically captured in the meeting recording. This works great for co-consumption scenarios and requires little developer investment.

Teams users on the desktop will get a way to ask for consent from other users to transcript meetings sometime in April:

The meeting policy that requires explicit consent to be recorded is expanding to include transcription. When the policy is applied, a notification will pop-up when the recording or transcription is initiated requesting consent of all participants to be transcribed and recorded. Before a user gives consent, the user cannot unmute, turn on camera or share content in the meeting.

Other new entries on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website include adding Graph Grounded Chat for Copilot in Excel in April on the web, desktop, and Mac:

Ask Copilot for answers grounded in your work content from the Microsoft Graph—your chats, documents, meetings, and emails—beyond your active Excel workbook. If you’re analyzing a workbook and want to enhance your understanding using information from another source in your tenant, just ask Copilot in Excel.

The new Outlook for Windows and the web will add a feature in May that will let users add shared folders to their favorites. If you have PDFs stored on your OneDrive account, a new web-based feature in May will let you annotate and save those files.

That is our look back at the past week on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. As usual, we will be back in seven more days with even more new entries to report.

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