Microsoft celebrates half a million organizations using Teams, announces upcoming Microsoft Whiteboard integration and more

Microsoft Teams is celebrating its second anniversary this week, and the software giant has just announced a new milestone for the Slack competitor. There are now more than 500,000 organizations using Microsoft Teams across 181 markets (up from 200K organizations a year ago), including 91 Fortune 500 companies.

The company also said that 150 organizations using Teams have 10,000 or more active users, which shows that the app can fit the needs of both SMBs and very large organisations.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced some important Teams updates including a customizable mobile Teams experience and a schedule management tool called Shifts. Today, the Redmond giant announced more new capabilities coming later this year, including customized backgrounds for video calls. This is an evolution of the intelligent background blur technology that debuted in Teams last year.

Microsoft Teams is also getting live captions and subtitles, a feature that recently launched in both Skype and PowerPoint. “Live captions & subtitles make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location,” the company explained.

Microsoft Teams is already a solid option for conference calls, but Microsoft announced today that the Live events feature that supports up to 10,000 attendees is now generally available. This feature also integrates with other Microsoft 365 tools like Stream or Yammer, and it also uses AI to provide automatic transcriptions.

Microsoft Teams Rooms, the company’s complete meetings and calling solution previously known as Skype Room Systems is also getting a new features. Today’s blog post mentioned an upcoming Microsoft Whiteboard integration, as well as support for additional cameras for capturing content. “Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text, so remote attendees can clearly see whiteboard brainstorming in real-time, even when someone is standing in front of the whiteboard,” the company explained. You can see how it will work in the GIF below.

Other updates coming to Microsoft Teams later this year are secure private channels, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations, as well as Information barriers for preventing conflicts of interest in an organisation. Lastly, Microsoft announced this week that Microsoft Teams now provides data residency for France using to the two data centers that recently opened in the country.