Intelligent Communications

One of the most exciting announcements to come out of Microsoft Ignite was the new vision for intelligent communications.

As the cornerstone for intelligent communications, we will be bringing comprehensive calling and meetings capabilities into Microsoft Teams, and Teams will evolve to become the primary client for intelligent communications in Office 365, replacing the Skype for Business client over time.

Users will realize benefits of this consolidation before, during, and after meetings.

• Before meetings, Microsoft Teams will surface relevant documents and rich information about the participants to help you prepare.
• During the meeting, the conversation can be captured, transcribed, and time-coded, with closed captioning and voice recognition for attributing remarks to specific individuals.
• After the meeting, the cloud recording and transcript can be automatically added to the relevant channel, so conversations, documents, notes, and action items can be reviewed, indexed, and searched by the entire team.

These changes are part of Microsoft’s roadmap for intelligent communications, but many enhancements have already been introduced. Over the past six months, Microsoft Teams has added features like guest access, Outlook calendar integration, and meetings on mobile.

In the coming months, we will begin adding calling features in Teams, including inbound and outbound calls to PSTN telephone numbers, hold, call transfer, and voicemail.

We are also introducing new enhancements to Teams meetings, including audio conferencing (available in preview today)—enabling participants to join a Teams meeting by dialling a telephone number—and interoperability between Teams and Skype for Business, including universal presence, and messaging and calling interoperability.