Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly: Teams will add a “meet now” feature and more

Welcome back to our weekly recap of the latest additions to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website. This week is a bit unique as some of the new entries were also announced in a recent Microsoft 365 blog post and a Teams press release earlier this week.

The presentation also showcased the upcoming release of a new Teams app called Queues, which will allow users to answer customer calls within Teams. This app is set to launch in June. Additionally, Microsoft’s Copilot will be available for interaction in the new Outlook for Windows and on the web in April.

Despite this, there are also several additional items listed on the roadmap site that are completely new. Among them is a new feature called Meet Now, coming to Teams for desktop in May as one of the latest additions.

Start a huddle with you colleagues using meet now in group chat. Meet now in group chat is a ringless experience designed to enable ad-hoc, real-time communication with your team in a hybrid environment.

In May, a new addition for Teams on the desktop is Programmatic Desktop Sharing, as announced on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

We are introducing programmatic desktop sharing, which allows developers to enable screensharing specific pieces of app content. Unlike the currently existing share to stage functionality, meeting participants cannot interact with the shared app; they have a view-only mode of the presenter’s app screen similar to screen sharing, but in one click. The shared content is also automatically captured in the meeting recording. This works great for co-consumption scenarios and requires little developer investment.

In April, users of Teams on desktop will have the ability to request consent from other users to transcribe meetings, as announced on the Microsoft 365 roadmap last week (389368).

The meeting policy that requires explicit consent to be recorded is expanding to include transcription. When the policy is applied, a notification will pop-up when the recording or transcription is initiated requesting consent of all participants to be transcribed and recorded. Before a user gives consent, the user cannot unmute, turn on camera or share content in the meeting.

Among the latest additions to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website is the implementation of Graph Grounded Chat for Copilot in Excel, set to launch in April on all platforms including web, desktop, and Mac.

Ask Copilot for answers grounded in your work content from the Microsoft Graph—your chats, documents, meetings, and emails—beyond your active Excel workbook. If you’re analyzing a workbook and want to enhance your understanding using information from another source in your tenant, just ask Copilot in Excel.

The upcoming update for Outlook on Windows and the web, set to be released in May, will introduce a new feature that allows users to add shared folders to their favorites. Additionally, a new web-based feature, also scheduled for release in May, will enable users to annotate and save PDFs stored on their OneDrive account.

This concludes our review of the previous week’s updates on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. As always, we will return in a week with additional new additions to share.