Campus: See What’s New in Microsoft Teams 

New features are being added to Western's Microsoft 365 applications all the time. Here are some of the recent updates to Microsoft Teams to make it a more useful tool for classes, meetings and collaboration. 

Breakout Rooms: Teams now offers breakout rooms in meetings. When in a meeting, click the Breakout Rooms button at the top of the meeting window, choose how many rooms to create, and then choose whether you want to assign the participants automatically or assign them manually. As the meeting organizer, you can use the Breakout Room menu on the right side of the meeting window to assign participants to rooms, add more rooms, or close all the rooms and bring participants back to the main meeting. 

Download Attendance Reports: During the meeting, you can click the Participants button at the top of the meeting window to bring up the Participants menu on the right-hand side. From the Participants menu, you can click the three dots and select “Download attendance list” to download a list of people attending the meeting.

Guard Against Zoom Bombing: The risk of “Zoom Bombing” (having uninvited people join your meeting to harass you and other participants) is quite low in Microsoft Teams, because you either need a Western username/password or a link to the meeting in order to join. But there are additional protections you can enable to further secure your meeting: 

• Click the Participants button to bring up the Participants menu on the right-hand side of the meeting window. From the Participants menu, click the three dots and choose “Manage permissions” to bring up a set of meeting options. These options will allow you to set who can bypass the lobby and who can present their screen during the meeting. 
   

Stay Apprised of New Features: For updates on new and upcoming features in Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications, check out the Microsoft 365 roadmap at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap.  

If you have any questions about using Teams, please reach out to the ATUS Help Desk at https://atus.wwu.edu/get-help or check out our recorded trainings in the Teams Learning channel at https://stream.microsoft.com.