• Scale your Teams to meet up to 20,000 participants. Reach larger audiences to stay connected with your employees, customers, and partners. When building this capability, we were focused on your meeting experience, making sure that even as the meeting scales it is still easy to manage and listen to the speakers.  Therefore, we limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants, with a seamless shift to a ‘view only’ mode after the limit is met.
• Enhanced admin control. Use new capabilities and insert more structure to meetings, by adding your company’s branding to meetings for a professional look and feel. Start out with branded meeting lobby, launching in the coming months, and extend your branding to the core meeting experience coming later. Connect with business applications to manage at scale and automate workflows. Work with Teams certified solution partners and help your organization address business needs by setting up a compliance recording policy or bringing in collaboration to your customer engagement workflows.

Each of these new capabilities will be enabled with the new Advanced Communications plan, which can be added to any Microsoft 365 or Office 365 paid subscription and is available this week.

When using Teams, you are getting best-in-class calling capabilities—validated by Team’s leader position in both the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave reports.  With all your communication tools in one place, Teams Calling makes it easy to call anyone, anywhere with any device. And, you can also move seamlessly between chatting, calling, and meetings based on your needs.

This saves IT time, reduces costs associated with multiple-point solutions, and diminishes the need for employee training. Teams Calling is a secure, robust solution that is being used by both large call centers and individuals alike. It can be deployed quickly using your existing calling plan or a Microsoft calling plan in select markets.

Microsoft Teams phones

As communication is being reimagined, so are the tools that we use to communicate. Instead of a desk phone and other peripherals, Microsoft is taking a fresh perspective on what a phone could be with the company’s newest device innovation, Microsoft Teams displays. This is a dedicated Teams device featuring an ambient touch screen, high-quality calling and video, and a hands-free experience powered by Cortana.

For customers looking to modernize their phones, Microsoft is bringing a new line of Microsoft Teams phones with physical buttons, high-quality audio, and core calling features at an affordable price. These phones are designed for common areas and basic information worker scenarios, with options available from AudioCodes, Poly, and Yealink starting in early 2021. We are also expanding our portfolio to deliver new USB peripherals that have dial pads and a modern Teams user interface for heavy call users. These USB phones work out of the box, featuring a Teams button, and will connect to both a PC and Mac to bring a high-quality Teams audio experience. These will be available in late 2020 and the first of which will be shipped with Yealink.

How Microsoft Teams is transforming calling for CenturyLink microsoft teams features

CenturyLink, a Telecommunication and technology company, had to rapidly respond to COVID-19 to support customers. The calling services in Teams mean that sales reps can take calls from their customers whether they are on their phone with the Teams mobile app or working on their laptop with the Teams client open. Over one weekend, CenturyLink deployed Teams to 8,000 employees in the North American sales force. By the end of three weeks, employees in North America were working from home, with the full global workforce of 40,000 quickly following—all using Teams.

“With the rapid move home during COVID-19, we were able to ensure that anyone had a telephony solution regardless of what devices they were using or where they were using them,” says Scott Poulter, Director of Systems Application and Transformation, Network Operations Center at CenturyLink. “It eliminated the need for a hard phone sitting on a desk and allowed people to continue to use the technology to connect with the people they needed to—customers or colleagues.”

With solutions like Kumospace for creating online spaces and meetings, companies have even more options for bringing distributed teams together on Teams and other platforms.

As your organization navigates a new normal of hybrid work and learning, Microsoft wants to help you with a communication solution that addresses the spectrum of your needs- with the right tools for any meeting size. The company understands that every customer is in a different stage of your digital transformation journey, and with this new set of communications tools, and Microsoft is here to make the adoption of the tools your organization needs as simple as possible.

There are several ways for you to get started with Teams easily:

1. Get started with Teams for free.
2. Get guidance and resources through the FastTrack program.
3. Microsoft is rolling out promotional offers for Advanced Communications, Audio Conferencing, and Teams Calling to support your communication journey and experience new capabilities.

A 60-day free trial of the new option will be offered from mid-August.