Microsoft will likely continue to release new incremental, as well as major, features for Teams every week as it has done for the past few years. The company has been focusing heavily on the telephony features in Teams and will likely continue to do so. It also will likely continue to integrate Teams with even more products and services in the Microsoft stack as the platform moves forward. One of the more major features on the Teams roadmap, on track to debut this month in preview form (according to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap), is the delayed Teams Connect collaboration capability. Also known at one point as “shared channels,” Connect will enable customers to use Team’s full suite of collaboration capabilities with external contacts in other Azure Active Directory organizations the same way they use them with colleagues from their own organizations. I’d assume Microsoft will continue to try to find ways to grow its Teams consumer business in ways that go beyond embedding Teams Chat in the taskbar on Windows 11, as Microsoft seemingly still thinks there is a prosumer market for Teams, not just commercial and education ones. Microsoft also is working to make Teams for work and school accounts more like Teams Consumer from an interface and back-end perspective via its “Teams 2.0” work. Teams desktop will no longer be an Electron app once this happens, which could make it faster and better performing. I’m also hoping for a UI update to Teams, too, as I still think it’s hard for new users to figure out where to start with the platform. Teams isn’t the only hub for work in the Microsoft world. But it’s been a major focus for the company and its customers in the past couple of years and likely will remain a major hot spot in terms of new features and functionality.
