Microsoft Roadmap Weekly: Two of the most requested features for Microsoft Teams, and more

There was no major Microsoft 365 feature launch last week. However, Windows 11 announced an improvement which finally allows file sharing to your phone. But, like every week, Microsoft updated its roadmap website with a host of new capabilities, all of which might arrive in the next few months.

This week’s Microsoft Roadmap Weekly includes exciting changes for Microsoft 365, including two of the most requested Teams features. We’re at it again here to inform you about the important changes added to their list last week, and to explain how you can benefit from them.

2 Microsoft Teams: New ways to manage notifications, new search suggestions, and more

Turn on/off notifications for a post

Microsoft Teams is one of the most widely used collaboration tools, and the software giant keeps working on improving it. Microsoft always seems to work on new Teams features that users want. Users have long been wanting Microsoft to add the ability to turn off notifications for a single post in Teams. If you’re one of them, you’re in lucky, as Microsoft will introduce this capability next month (Feature ID: 399782).

Show/hide the Discover Feed

Microsoft launched Teams Discover Feed earlier this year to offer users customized channel content based on the people they work with and topics they’re interested in. However, many users on the Microsoft Tech Community website don’t like how it’s being forced on all users and want this to change. After listening to users’ feedback, Microsoft is now committed to doing a course correction by giving users the option to show or hide Discover Feed from Teams in the Settings. This will be available for Teams PC and Mac clients next month (Feature ID: 399783).

Message result suggestions

Another noteworthy upcoming feature is message result suggestions when you type a query in the search bar. Being able to filter search results is already possible in Teams, but from next month, you’ll also be able to include “messages” as one of the filters (Feature ID: 398955). This will help you to quickly find the messages you’re looking for. This update will be limited to PC and Mac users.

1 Copilot for Microsoft 365: Writing coach, long document summarization, and more

One-click example of prompts in Word

Copilot has the ability to generate prompts to make it easier for users to start a chat or reply in one. However, the same can’t be said about Copilot in Word. But this will change by the end of this month when Microsoft introduces “one-click examples of prompts” in Copilot for Word to help you quickly get started on drafting a document (Feature ID: 399918).

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Longer document summarization

In addition to suggested prompts, Copilot in Word will also become capable enough to summarize longer documents in chat. It will be able to summarize documents containing four times more words than the current limit by the end of this month (Feature ID: 399413).

Writing coach in Word

Although Copilot can write a draft if you know the basics of prompting, you’ll soon be able to use Copilot as your writing coach. Come July, you’ll see the coaching option in the Copilot context menu in Word, which will review your document and give you suggestions on how to improve the write-up (Feature ID: 399923).

Take release timelines with a grain of salt

Although Microsoft doesn’t explicitly say it, release timelines mentioned on the roadmap websites are subject to change. So, if you don’t see any of those aforementioned changes in the next couple of months, you can easily assume that Microsoft has delayed it to a later date.