Fancy trying to explain Microsoft Teams to your parents? They may ask about the new Personal version
- Reference: 1621318372
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/18/teams_personal_features/
- Source link:
Formally known as “Personal features in Teams”, the new offering is a free app for Windows, ioS, and Android, or runs in any browser.
The app combines chat, scheduling, lists, task assignments, polls, and some document-based collaboration. Demo vids watched by The Register suggest the chat is prettier and uses more pastels than WhatsApp, with integration of schedules and lists more than decent. Chats and video calls (more on them later) can be staged among groups, and in the USA and Canada group members can use SMS rather than signing up for teams. All other features require a Microsoft account.
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Microsoft is making a virtue of the fact that video calls can place all participants in a virtual space in which they’ll appear as torsos with the rest of their bodies hidden behind strategically placed furniture. A more conventional Brady Bunch interface is also offered.
Floating emojis appear to be enabled everywhere .
[4]'Big updates' to Mac design app Sketch add real-time collaboration – but you'll need to fork out for a subscription
[5]Microsoft says Outlook hit by 'email visibility issues' – as in, they're blank
[6]Trend Micro hosted email service is down, inboxes still stuck in cloudy limbo
[7]Microsoft reassures Teams freebie fans: We're not going to delete all your data, honest
Microsoft is pitching Teams personal as the COVID-era collaboration tool your family needs now – let’s just ignore that it hasn’t been safe to go outside for nearly 14 months and that Microsoft is more than a little off the pace.
The company appears to be trying to make up ground by being rather generous: one-to-one calls are free and can last 24 hours apiece. Group calls can involve 300 people for 24 hours, an offer Microsoft says will be “free until further specified” and exceeds a regular 100 participants for an hour free tier.
Even at the latter level, Personal features for Teams offers 100-person meetings 20 minutes longer than Zoom’s free offering. WhatsApp only allows eight person vid chats.
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Microsoft has a billion-plus Windows users to tap with this new app, so it may well collect a colossal user base despite being a little late to market.
Now to explain it to your parents. ®
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/sketch_mac_updates/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/outlook_outage_patch/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/11/trend_email_outage/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/05/teams_bug/
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[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
They're dead and even Teams won't reach them...
If he was still with us my dad would be 85 now and wouldn't need any help to use his laptop.
I guess it may work here...
It's awful to use for business, though it does now nearly have all the useful features* that things like WebEx had over ten years ago.
I currently use a few different platforms, and I would rate the main ones I use:
1) Zoom
2) WebEx
3) Teams
* I really do not count being able to put "the team" in the seats of a virtual lecture room as a useful feature (but then, I'm not in sales and marketing).
How big a family
Group calls can involve 300 people
Not sure I have enough family for a 300 person group call...
Just wait for all the calls from the relatives that say "why is my machine running so slow ?"
That my dear family, is Teams in action
Floating emojis appear to be enabled everywhere.
Microsoft products would likely be a lot better if the developers made sure the basics worked first, before wasting time on adding silly features like that.
I assume that like Skype; Teams Personal, uses a totally different delivery architecture to Teams (Business) and thus the two can't communicate...
If MS have managed to make the two have the same delivery architecture, I expect they use different clients - unlike Zoom where you can have multiple user accounts and available functionality is thus determined by the account being used.
They don't use Microsoft...
Thank the gods.
They're firmly in the Apple camp & thus I no longer have to do tech support for their issues. Even better is that they don't have webcams & microphones on their laptops, StepDad permanently disables them the moment he buys a "new" (refurb) machine, so if they ever decide to do a video call, it'll have to be on their Iphones. Which, thankfully, also won't get the taint of MS infecting them any time soon.
=-)p