- [upbeat music] 

STEPHEN ROSE: Welcome, and thank you for joining us, for our "Hybrid work with Microsoft Teams" webcast. I'm your host 

STEPHEN ROSE. And today we are doing our Ignite day 1 wrap-up, and I am super, super excited for my guest today, Ms. Aya Tange. Aya is our product marketing manager for our Teams, and you folks have seen her in our keynotes and in a lot of our cool onstage demos, and I'm very, very excited to have her here today. Aya, welcome. 

AYA TANGE: Thanks for having me, Stephen. So good to see you. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah, it's great to have you on the show. It was a crazy day today, Ignite day 1. So, before we jump in, first of all, take a moment, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Microsoft and for Microsoft Teams. 

AYA TANGE: Sure thing. So, hi everyone. My name is Aya Tange. I'm a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. I've been at the company for four years now, which is . . . time has flown. And I have been on the team for about two years. So, it's been a lot of fun. And its been moving very quickly ah, but its been, it's been great. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. Awesome. Well, it was funny because I told people that you are going to be on the show. And I started getting some really interesting IMs from people saying, "You know, I've seen her pop up on a bunch of stuff, but we don't know much about her." So, I went out and ah, went out on the internet and grabbed some photos of you. And I thought it'd be great. I'm going to share these now for you to tell me what's going on in these photos, OK? 

AYA TANGE: Do I want to know, Stephen? I'm already worried. 

STEPHEN ROSE: It's all good stuff. I was very, very careful. Let's start with this one. What is going on in this photo? 

AYA TANGE: Well, that's me graduating from college. I went to Harvard. You can see it graduation day, so, there is [indistinct], as well. I studied economics, sociology, and psychology, [indistinct] people and how they think. And so it was an amazing four years on the East Coast, but I am now very happy in Seattle and enjoying the West Coast now. 

STEPHEN ROSE: All right, let's take a look at this next photo. Why do you look like Audrey Hepburn in this photo? It's an amazing photo, but not at all what I expected to see come up when I typed in your name. So, what is happening here? 

AYA TANGE: It's not a normal thing, Stephen. So, that's the right reaction, that's for sure. 

STEPHEN ROSE: That is my Sunday lounge-about outfit. 

AYA TANGE: That's actually my robe [laughs]. No, that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I was asked to be in a, it was a debutante ball-slash-fashion show in Paris, which was amazing. So, I went out to Paris for about a week, and it was . . . I got to wear haute couture and [Indistinct] designer here and got to really be a princess for a couple of days. 

STEPHEN ROSE: And then the opposite end of this spectrum are these two photos, where you are not wearing any couture or makeup or any of that great stuff, but it looks like you're a bit of an adrenaline junkie. So what's happening in these two photos over here? 

AYA TANGE: I am. I love getting outside and being out and about. So anytime I can do an activity out there, I'm doing it. So I've got dog sledding happening up in Whistler, and I went out there with a couple of friends. I'm also a big skier. So, we went really for skiing, but we also had the opportunity to dog sled, and I had never done that before. So, got to do that, even got to kind of guide the sled, which was awesome with the dogs. And then on the other side, I'm paragliding in San Diego. So, just ran off a cliff, didn't have an instructor with me, but ran off a cliff and got to paraglide for the first time a couple of years ago. So yeah, definitely. I get together with my friends and we go do fun activities. 

STEPHEN ROSE: That is awesome. I'm going to stop sharing these now, but. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah, I don't only look at a computer screen. I do try and do some outdoor . . . you see my bike right here, too. So, definitely try and get out and about. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Its absolutely true. Really great to see. All right, well, let's, let's talk about Ignite. Enough about the cool stuff that you do and your bike behind you and all of that. So, let's talk about some of our big announcements. So, I had a few thoughts and something I want to ask you about. Let's talk about the first one: new Together Mode screens. We're trying to find better ways for people to connect as they start to move into a hybrid workplace, as people are in the workplace at home. So talk about some of the new Together Mode screens. 

AYA TANGE: Sure. So you know, those who are not familiar, where we created Together Mode to really help reduce [inaudible] fatigue and bring everyone together in a shared virtual space. And so we released the Auditorium view in July, I want to say, but people want more, right? It was like, Well, sometimes I have coffee chats, or I want to be in a conference room, and we want to be in an auditorium or classroom setting. So, can you help us do that? And so we took that feedback and said, yep, we're working on a broad range of things for you. And so that's really where this all came about. So, you know, we showcase it in [inaudible] keynote. I think it's [inaudible], as well, so definitely in the past couple sessions today. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. Breakout Rooms-- something we announced a little while ago, and that's been a huge ask for EDU so that they can . . . and the goal . . . and the reason . . . the thing behind it is you can either say I'm going to put these people into rooms, or you can just say automatically split everybody up. The instructor or whoever is speaking can go into those rooms, can join in, see what folks are doing and bringing back. Now, we did announce this a little while ago, so what's the update now, now that we're at Ignite time frame? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, it's going to be coming out really shortly. Before we announced it, but we really didn't showcase exactly how people could do it. And so, that's really kind of the point today is to just showcase, What is that going to look like for you? It's coming so soon. And so you'll actually be able to use that, whether you're in an organization like in a kind of business or in the education space. So, available to all. 

STEPHEN ROSE: OK. We have some new custom layouts. Presenters can be able to customize the content where, you know, are they going to be on the top or video views? So kind of walk us through this and why this is so important. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So we've actually built out these custom layouts for larger meetings and virtual events. We know everything [Inaudible]. And so we want to make sure that you have a really engaging experience as a presenter and for the attendees, obviously. And so these custom layouts really help you showcase the meaning of content, the way you want it to show up. We can call it like the "weather forecaster" view . . . 

STEPHEN ROSE: Right. 

AYA TANGE: . . . kind of what you do on TV. So very similar situation like that. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. Meeting Recap, where you're now going to get the recording, the transcript, the chat, all the shared files at the end. And this is something that folks have been asking about for quite a while is, Can I make it, where after the meeting, everybody gets stuff. So anything interesting that we added kind of that we talked about today on that? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, the Meeting Recap is really this whole experience to kind of tie the bow on that meeting that you just had. So you've got everything at your fingertips, it's all in that chat window. And so what we're really trying to do is just streamline that and make it easy for you to find the information that you need. And that's really the goal here is to make it quick, to make it easy, to make it simple. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. Large meeting support. We increased our support for meetings. I know that we now are growing that up to a thousand participants in a full meeting, and we're going to be scaling that up. And what kind of numbers are we looking for for our view-only meeting experiences? 

AYA TANGE: I think we're up to 20,000--20,000 participants in view only, which is pretty amazing. And so it's just the whole goal here is to make it easy for people to expand their meeting. Again, going back to that webinar-like of experience, people need to be able to see and join. So we're trying to make it as easy as possible. 

STEPHEN ROSE: OK. Registration support. So now at the end of meetings, you'll be able to get a list of the attendees. So talk a lot, a little bit more about that because I know a lot of people have said, When is this coming for EDU and for businesses, et cetera. 

AYA TANGE: Yep. So, it's coming soon. We're really making sure that we make it easy for you to create that meeting, to send it out to a community. So, that automated email is really important. And then the engagement reporting at the end so you actually see how, how your webinar or how your, your large meeting worked. And so we're bringing that all together so you'll have that end-to-end experience. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. Meeting extensibility points. I don't think that means a lot for people. So we said--and I'm going to get the wording correct-- "We're working with our partners with new meeting extensibility ports so partners can integrate their apps with Teams meetings." So, in English, what does that mean for us? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah, let me kind of demystify that. So we're actually working with our partners to bring in apps into the meeting experience. So, you know, certainly now is a great example where they actually are helping the customer support experience, and so you can be on a call, you can bring up that ticket and work on it together live. And so, it's really working with our partners to bring that meeting app within the Teams meeting specifically. And so, that's a really exciting thing where we can bring, bring all that into a live setting as people are discussing. 

STEPHEN ROSE: This is so important because this is why we refer to Teams as a platform and not as an app because we have this. And we'll talk about Power Apps and a lot of things we announced there in a few minutes, but, and this was really interesting because I wasn't expecting this to come, and that's the speaker attribution for captions and transcripts. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah 

STEPHEN ROSE: This is really cool. So explain what this is for folks because this is going to make, if you miss the meeting, so much easier to be able to follow it and understand what happened in it. 

AYA TANGE: Totally. It's one of the features that I find very inclusive to all. I use it all the time now, so I can see who's saying what. But it's also really important for those who have hearing difficulties to actually understand who is saying what within the meeting. We've had live captioning for awhile, but now you can actually see, Stephen said this or Aya said this, is really helpful. And for me, it's particularly helpful when I'm in a large meeting and I don't know who said what, or, you know, I'm in a meeting and I don't know everyone. So then, I have to kind of look and say, Oh, that's the person I need to follow up with. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Right. 

AYA TANGE: So it's a really great way to just understand who's in the room with you. 

STEPHEN ROSE: That's awesome. Whiteboard. We're doing some more and newer, deeper integration with Whiteboard in Teams. So let's take a moment and chat about that one. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, Whiteboard is obviously something that's really important, especially in a virtual world, because you can't bring in a physical whiteboard, but we're adding some new capabilities like sticky notes--you can write on the sticky note-- and text, as well. So we're just continuing to add more capabilities to our Whiteboard experiment so that everyone can grow virtually together. 

STEPHEN ROSE: OK. And we've updated our calling experience. This was really great to be able to see in the keynotes and such this morning. So talk about some of the new things because it's, it's awesome and it's horrible at the same time. Let's explain what I mean. I get this all the time. They moved my button. I can't find this button to do this. And then we'd update something and go, Oh, where did it go? 

AYA TANGE: I know. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Now we are very well aware of this. And hopefully now, with some of the new UI designs we're going to bring, it'll stop some of that from happening. So talk a little bit about the new calling experience. And how we can ... 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, number 1 is, we're simplifying it, right? We want you to have that streamlined view, to have your contacts, to have your voicemail, your calling history, all in one, we're all on one screen. It makes it easy for you to initiate that call. So we're kind of doing a lot in that space. We're also bringing a lot of the popular reading features that you have, you know, in your larger meetings. That includes, you know, transcription, closed caption, recording, and even being able to transfer between Teams mobile and our Teams desktop app. So, a lot of these meetings capabilities we're bringing into the one-on-one calls because we want to make sure that you that on your one-on-one call, as well. 

STEPHEN ROSE: And that's really huge because it was odd that we could, if there are three people on a call, we could record it. But if I just called you, I couldn't record that call and save it, which could be something really important-- if I knew you were going away for a week and I wanted to do a quick meeting with you. And hey, I'm going to be out this week and here's what's important and check this out and here's a list of everything and rather than have to call a meeting for that. So that, that's really cool that we've done that. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah 

STEPHEN ROSE: And these templates . . . that's something that we brought out. These are now have gone GA, and these allow us to create Teams faster. Do you want to share anything about that? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, Teams templates are generally available. And yeah, to your point, Stephen, it's really about making it faster and easier for you to create these teams. And you can choose from common business scenarios like, you know, event management or crisis response or an education template. An industry-specific template, for that matter, like a hospital or something like that. And so all of them have predefined channels and apps that makes that whole team creation not as scary, maybe, for some folks. They've really got that, kind of, backing of this template and hand-holding from us. And then, of course, you can customize it however you like from that template. 

STEPHEN ROSE: That's awesome. I love pinned chats. That has been a lifesaver for me to be able to get those up there. And I know now that we've had, we've now added pinned posts. So, what's the difference between a pinned chat and a pinned post? AYA TENGE: So, I know a lot of you are on Twitter. So, maybe something like that, where you can pin a tweet at the top so you don't lose it. So, something very similar to that. So, if there is a post in your team channel that you want everyone to see, you can actually pin it so that it'll constantly show up. It's easier to see rather than rolling up as more people write. So that's really the best. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah. We've upgraded our search results, which is great. We now have Teams support up to 25,000 members, and we're offering suggested replies, which is really nice. It makes it easier to say if it's obvious, like, Hey, I updated this, where you can just say, "Awesome, thank you." And you just click it rather than having to type it in. 

AYA TANGE: I use that all the time. 

STEPHEN ROSE: I have started to. as well. But mobile--and I love our mobile app-- we've now added something that I feel is a real big game changer, which is offline files and mobile. And this is something we brought to OneDrive and SharePoint a while back. What this allows you to do is if you're working on something or you have some files you want to work on and you're not going to be connected, that you can take those files, take them offline, edit them, work on them in an offline mode, and then, when you reconnect, those updates are brought into the team for everybody else. 

AYA TANGE: Right. That was a big request. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Yes, it is because right now, you have to be online for all the stuff that you want to do. And that's great until you get on a plane and you've got eight hours in there and documents you need to be able to see. So that's much easier for folks, and they can just go in, click that Download button. It'll save it locally, and then as soon as you . . . Do you have to click Uploaded again? Or is it as soon as you go online or is it based on the settings that the admin does? 

AYA TANGE: I think it's actually automatic, but I'd have to confirm on that one. It could be that an admin might have to make those settings, as well. 

STEPHEN ROSE: OK. I know we've done some new things with online presence, where you have the ability to change your presence for a specific period of time. This is great if you're going to be speaking or you have something going on where you don't want to be bothered. We've now we announced a little while ago about the rollout of Tasks into Teams. Has that moved to GA? Is that where we are at? 

AYA TANGE: So, yeah. You will now start to see the Tasks app in your Teams client. And it's really great. I've been really happy using it because it was part of the connection between To Do and Planner, and I had all my tasks--I don't want to say "tasks." I'll use another word--all my different To Do items. So now I can bring it all together in Tasks. And so, it just streamlines it, and it's easier. 

STEPHEN ROSE: OK, cool. We saw some really great stuff on first-line workers. What were some of your favorite new features that are going to come that you feel are either, you know, evolutionary, really interesting, or revolutionary wow no one saw this coming kind of thing? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. I really think the tagging by shift is going to be really great for folks because now, you know, you can send a message to whoever's on, you know, on during that time. You don't have to go, OK, is Aya on right now? [inaudible] ... who I should be writing to? So really, it's automatic for folks, especially, you know, thinking about in a health care scenario, when you really need urgent response. And so really, really great that we can use those tags and write to people based on those kind of [indistinct] Tags. I think that's pretty exciting. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. I know we've added a bunch of new features for administrators. I'm just going to do a top-level on a few of these. Microsoft Graph API; support for Teams import; the Deployment Advisor, which I really love, which helps folks that are getting ready to roll it out; the deployment, the sorry, the ARM 64-bit native support; customer key support-- that's a really huge one that we've been waiting for where customers can hold their own encryption key for their data in the cloud; the Microsoft API Graph for Teams data, for teams DLP, for the data loss prevention; API for Teams export; and the organizational branding of line-of-business Teams in the App Catalog. So a lot there. We made a bunch of announcements, though, about some of the new Power Apps and Power Automate features. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. 

STEPHEN ROSE: You want to talk about any one of those? Are there a few that you . . . 

AYA TANGE: Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about some of those. Yeah, we definitely made some new improvements and exciting announcements today, some of them being the new Power Automate app in Teams. We've added some new templates, made it easier to actually automate your processes. You can do everything within Teams. So, that's something to definitely check out. We want to make it easy for you. I don't have a coding background or a dev background. Am I going to use these apps? That's really awesome. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah, like approvals in Teams. This is something that's not that difficult to do, but what's great is, rather than have to send out approvals as a separate piece, you can start a private channel, a private conversation, public, public, et cetera, and you can say, Hi, here are three. This is who it needs to go to. And then once it gets approved, it moves down. You can track that, see where that's at, add comments. And that's really huge. And I know with Power Apps in general, and this is great, Paul Thurrott and I had a long conversation on this. He was absolutely blown away at how easy it is to build one of these low-code, no-code apps. That you can simply go into SharePoint, create a SharePoint list with a bunch of content, then create an API and pull from that. And someone could say, I want to know how many of this is in our warehouse or stored here. It's available for mobile. It's on desktop. And it all really comes in. So those enhancements that we're bringing in, the usage analytics, the API for the management capabilities, single sign-on, which is so important for so many people to be able to do this because nobody wants to have to go through sign-in 12 different times to do something that's supposed to be making your life even easier and better. Yeah. And Adaptive Cards. What's an adaptive card? I played with these a little bit, but is there like a good, you know, I know that it's this tool that helps developers to build these really cool rich cards that give you bits of information. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. The Adaptive Cards are great because it makes it easy . . . they'll show up in a chat or they'll show up in a channel, and then you really just can click and include them in an approval where you say, accept or deny? So, it really makes it easy for the approval of, in this case, the approver to say Hey no or Yes, let's make this go through. So you can think about these cards, to get back to your point about, Look: information you can act upon. And so, it makes it more of a user experience . . . from a user experience standpoint it makes it easy. [Inaudible] I'll quickly touch on the fact that [inaudible] right within Teams. You actually test them out right within Teams. It's really exciting that we can do all of that on a single platform. 

STEPHEN ROSE: And somebody hovers over to it tells them who that person is, what role, where they sit within the organization, other communications. So you don't have to do what a lot of us do, which is going to Outlook type in somebody's name, hit Control-K, then put your cursor over it and take a look. And, oh, that's who that person is. And that's their roll. Now, you can do that right inside of Teams without ever having to leave the Chrome for that. 

AYA TANGE: You got it. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Absolutely. Cool. Teams mobile updates. We had a bunch: ability to capture images with Office Lens, location detection, Image Viewer. I love this one: the ability to use device barcode or QR scanner, which is certainly going to make things a lot interesting for our first-line workers. Bunch of new developer capabilities, including being able to run Visual Studio Code right from your test device and some new Github stuff. Touchless was a big part of our keynotes. Talk a little bit about this whole touchless thing that we talked about. 

AYA TANGE: Sure. Yeah. It's, you know, the hybrid workplace, right? We hear this word used across many of our sessions today. It's this whole idea of, Look, you know, we were all remote, but now we're coming back in the office. And we know that there's immense value and the office space for employees. And we need to think about, What does that look like for people? We want to make sure it safe and meets safety guidelines. And so, what does that . . . how do we make a touchless experience and support group in collaboration between the remote and in-person participant. So, we had a couple of announcements today, if you haven't seen our keynotes yet around our . . . specifically around devices, is that Teams panels. And so, this really makes it easy for you to identify if a space is open, [indistinct] And, it also gives you the capacity list [Inaudible], so let's say there are four people in there and they're socially distanced and everything's OK. If one extra person goes in, then it's hard to social distance. So, it'll actually warn you and say, Hey, the room's at capacity right now, please don't enter. And so, its really that we have these sort of experiences to keep people safe. Another one, too, is this are idea [Inaudible] So, the Teams rooms devices and like a Surface [Inaudible] in the room will actually be able to join the meeting simultaneously, even using Cortana, so you don't have to touch anything and it will actually avoid any feedback or, you know, they'll call-in sound when people have, you know, multiple devices on and they're not on mute. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Oh God, yeah. 

AYA TANGE: Yeah, that noise. But actually being able to coordinate that so it's seamless one-touch join. You'll have your participants on one screen and a virtual whiteboard on the other. So really great experience for those in the room and makes the remote participants really feel a part of it, as well. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. I have a few questions coming in from some of the folks who are watching. The first one is, we said this morning that, and I want to quote this correctly so I went back, "60% of people feel that . . ." Sorry, "60% of people say they feel less connected to their colleagues since moving to remote work." Isn't Teams supposed to help that and make that better? W are we doing to help to reduce that number? 

AYA TANGE: Yeah. So, meeting fatigue. It's *the* problem right now because we're all looking through these video cameras, and it's hard because [inaudible] But here I am in my home office looking at this little camera on my computer. But you know one of the biggest kind of innovative things that we've done is VR mode. And so that's the way of using AI segmentation technology. We've actually been able to remove kind of the distracting backgrounds or the grid lines that we're all in when we're in the square. We've actually been able to remove that, bring everyone into the full space, so your eyes are really focused on the people now, and you can look around, you can have five people and it really creates a little bit more of that connection. And so that is one example of saying, wow, we learned that people are having trouble. How are we going to fix that? That's really just one example. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Whiteboard is another one, I think, that really helps to get people engaged when they can write or draw or cut and paste or throw in that can really help to aid creativity, and Break-Out Rooms, to get people into smaller groups, where they almost need to talk to each other. It's different when there's 20 people in the room, nobody feels like they need . . . You're broken into a group of four? It's really hard to get away without chatting. So that ability to have four people in their own room, Whiteboard chat, and then come back are all things that we can do to help make it a little bit more inclusive and bring that down. Another question came in. "What was your favorite announcement or the one that you've been most looking forward to out of all the announcements that we made?" 

AYA TANGE: That's a hard question. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Which baby is ugly, and which one is not? that's what they're asking. 

AYA TANGE: I don't know how I feel about that question. 

STEPHEN ROSE: It's one where a lot of people said, Come on. When is this going to hit? Let's do two: one where it's, is this finally available and people been asking for it? and one that I think you're excited opens up some opportunities. How's that? 

AYA TANGE: So, the Together Mode scenes I think are going to be a huge crowd pleaser because I think people really thought the Auditorium view looked great. But, you know, not everyone will . . . use [inaudible] So I'm really excited that people will use them for coffee chats, or people will be able to use them in a conference room setting just to really set that tone. I think that's really going to help people, especially with the meeting fatigue. It's going to be able to bring people together and set the right tone. And so, I think people . . . it'll help kind of from a mental perspective. I think the chat rooms is obviously, everyone, you know, everyone's really, really excited about that one. I think that's going to be another really important feature that is coming down the pipeline so soon. 

STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. All right. I want to start to wrap things up here, but obviously, you know, myignite.microsoft.com/home to go check out all the Microsoft Ignite content. The Virtual Hub, where we have over 150 of these more deep-dive sessions that folks are looking for. It's super important for folks to go to because we only have so much content that's live during Ignite as it's happening. The rest of it is all in the Virtual Hub. The Teams Community Blog, which you do your monthly blog post, Aya, on what's new in Teams, which we want folks to really check out. And of course, the Microsoft 365 Blog at aka.ms/M365/TeamsBlog. So, all of these are great things that we want folks to go check out. There's a ton of announcements. We have a ton of great deep-dive content that we want you to go see. I want to thank Aya for joining us today. I know how busy she is with all the announcements and stuff going on. You can find her on Twitter, under her name, and that's a great way to reach out to her with questions, or send them to me and we'll forward them. So, here's our wrap-up for day 1. Awesome stuff. This Friday, we have our wrap-up for day 2, with our very special guests, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. So we look forward to you joining us. Of course, as always, send us a picture of your Teams setup or your cool desk setup. Maybe we'll send you out some cool Teams swag. And follow me on Twitter @StevenLRose We will see you on Friday for our Ignite wrap-up show. Thanks for joining us.