Everything new for Microsoft Teams in May 2022

Microsoft Teams Note20 On Keyboard
(Image credit: Future)

What you need to know

  • Microsoft rolled out a long list of new features to Teams this month.
  • Teams now has new options for enhancing videos, such as adjusting brightness.
  • Several new Teams devices also became available in May 2022.

Microsoft regularly adds new features to Teams. The company shares a list of everything that's new at the end of each month to make it easy to catch up. In May 2022, Teams gained new options for adjusting videos, Together mode support for more people, and much more. Here's a rundown of those features and everything else that's new for Teams from this month.

Performance updates

Teams now allows you to adjust the brightness of your video, which can be useful in areas with poor lighting. The app supports soft focus now as well.

Admins can now have information in meeting invitations appear in up to two languages.

The Together mode view can now be enabled by presenters and organizers for all meeting participants. Previously, there was only the option for meeting attendees to enable the feature for their own personal view.

Microsoft also rolled out several features for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including multi-windows support, the ability to give and take control, background blur support, and Dynamic Emergency Calling.

Devices and Teams Meeting Rooms

Microsoft Teams Horizontal Gallery View

(Image credit: Microsoft)

It's now possible to directly join Zoom meetings through Microsoft Teams Rooms and Android devices. Microsoft also added a horizontal participant gallery to Teams this month.

The following Teams certified devices also game out in May 2022:

  • Logitech Zone True Wireless earbuds
  • Huddly L1 and Crestron Flex
  • Yamaha ADECIA Tabletop Solution
  • Shure Digital Signal Processor

Chat and collaboration

Microsoft Teams Approvals App

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Suggested replies within Teams are now supported in Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Korean, Czech, Danish, Turkish, and Polish.

Teams gained the ability to show a specified status during a meeting. For example, a meeting attendee could have their calendar say they were free or out of office while a meeting was scheduled.

The Approvals app in Teams now supports mandatory comments for requests and exporting approval data into an Excel file.

Management

The Teams app usage report has an updated version that supports Live of business apps. Admins also gained the ability to customize the Teams Admin Center dashboard this month.

Managers also have new ways to see detailed reports, including being able to see group policy assignments in the activity log and the option to view a custom app's external app ID on the Manage apps page.

Teams for Education

Staff and faculty license holders can now view insights for aggregated student activity from Career Coach.

Frontline workers

Teams Templates received enhancements this month that add additional apps and channels. Additionally, the Walkie Talkie app in Teams is now supported on Crosscall devices.

Government

Several new features also became available for those in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD). As a reminder, features often roll out to these types of customers later than to general users, due to increased security guidelines.

  • Together Mode in Teams Meetings on Web
  • Anonymous meeting join across clouds
  • Presenter mode: Controls to move and resize presenter video
  • Mirror my video
  • Music Mode
  • Support of Live Caption for Teams on VDI for Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix
  • New default settings when opening Office files For Government clouds

Microsoft's post gathers together all of the features that shipped to Teams this month. The company also announced features at Build 2022 that are on the way to Teams.

In addition to outlining the new features for Teams, Microsoft highlighted that the app is now available through the Microsoft Store.

Sean Endicott
News Writer and apps editor

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com.