Teams Update – Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away

Microsoft Teams users got some good news / bad news from Microsoft today...

The good news is that the much awaited multi window chat functionality is going to start rolling out over the next few weeks. Multi-Window Chat is a new Microsoft Teams feature which enables users to multitask more efficiently by popping out their chat conversations into separate windows. Microsoft will begin roll-out to all customers starting in early April and expect to complete the roll-out by the end of May. The initial roll-out will be for Windows clients only. Microsoft will provide support for Mac and Linux clients in the coming weeks.

Now the bad news....

Because of the unprecedented load on the Teams service, Microsoft has had to throttle some functionality inside Teams and Office 365, and disable others, a list of the changes are below:

Teams:

• Teams will poll less for user presence updates
• The interval in which we show when the other party is typing will increase
• Video resolution will be capped to 720p in meetings

OneNote:

• OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
• Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
• You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates as http://aka.ms/notesupdates.

SharePoint:

• We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
• Reduced video resolution for playback videos.

Stream:

• People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
• Meeting recording video resolution adjusted to 720p

The big news here is that if you regularly use OneNote documents within Microsoft Teams, this functionality is about to become read only and OneNote documents will have to be edited separately, this could cause some issues if you have lots of OneNote tabs within Teams.

We're sure this functionality will return when Microsoft has sufficient capacity or the server load reduces, but currently we have no idea when this will be.