Microsoft 365 Updates for the Week of April 13th.

WolfPack, this week Microsft has announced many enhancements for Teams app and a Modern SharePoint experience for the metadata service.

Teams Meeting Experience Improvements
Changes to Video Layout in Teams Meetings
Microsoft is releasing to the Teams public ring a highly requested feature, the ability to display more than 4 videos simultaneously in Teams meetings.
The service will be upgraded to support up to 9 videos on screen at once. The experience will automatically optimize for attendees who have enabled video and places the remaining audio-only participants below the meeting stage. The Meeting experience will also automatically adjust based on the user’s bandwidth to deliver the best meeting experience.

Users can expect this new feature to begin rolling out near the end of April with the rollout scheduled to be completed in early May

Background effects in Teams meetings:
A highly anticipated feature, meeting background effects is coming to Teams soon. Users will be able to select Microsoft provided background images prior or during a video call. Microsoft will introduce the ability for users to upload their own custom images in May.

New experience for launching instant channel meetings:
Users will now see the ‘Meet Now’ button in the Channel header in the top-right corner.

Improved Teams meeting join launcher experience:
When launching a Teams meeting from a link, users will be provided with clearer options for how they would like to join the meeting.

The schedule for the deployment of these new features:

Background effects in Teams meetings is rolling out the beginning in mid-April
New experience for launching instant channel meetings is rolling out in late April
Improved Teams meeting join launcher experience is rolling out in late April

New Feature: Modern Experience for Managed Metadata Services, Tagging and Filtering
Another classic SharePoint experience is finally being upgraded to the Modern experience. The new Modern Metadata Experience (MMS) will include the following features:

A modern term store manager in the SharePoint Admin Center
A modern content type gallery in the SharePoint Admin Center for creating and managing content types stored in the content type hub
New tagging and filtering options for end users as well as a new tree view

Here is an overview of the three new experiences:

The new term store experience will enable management of only the global term sets, local term set management is unchanged.

The new content type gallery allows you to create and manage custom content types from the admin center.

End users will see new filtering and tagging options in the managed metadata columns. When filtering, this new tree control is available within ‘See all’ in the filter panel. When tagging an item, users will see a new tree control to help select the desired term.