Dialling into important Microsoft Teams calls is set to get a lot more secure thanks to a new update to the service.
The video conferencing platform is working on a new feature that allows users of the commercial tier of Teams to join meetings in higher-level cloud tiers, such as those used by government agencies, without needing to go through repeated checks.
In an entry on the official Microsoft 365 roadmap, the new addition, described as, “anonymous meeting join across clouds”, outlines how commercial Teams users will be able to smoothly enter meetings in a number of different workspaces and groups, all the way up to Department of Defense (DOD) level in the US.
Anonymous join
Currently, anyone without a Microsoft Teams account is able to click on a Teams invite link to dial into a call and be shown as an anonymous participant, but this upgrade will now mean more high-level users will also now be able to utilise the function too.
The roadmap entry goes on to describe how the feature will allow users to, “join meetings in other clouds anonymously from your Teams desktop app (across clouds)”, mentioning not just DOD meetings, but also Government Community Cloud (GCC) calls.
The change will allow Commercial Microsoft Teams users to join GCC and DoD meetings with just a normal meeting link, with the same being true the other way around. Following the update, meeting hosts will be able to control who can enter the actual meeting.
Microsoft says the feature, which is listed as “in development” right now, should be released by October 2021. The company says it will be enabling the feature in three phases, with Commercial and GCC customers the first to be able to join meetings in “GCC-High” and DOD clouds.
Next, GCC-High customers will be able to join Commercial, GCC and DOD meetings – and finally, DOD customers will be able to join Commercial, GCC, and GCC-High meetings.
The news comes shortly after Microsoft revealed another addition to Teams that it hopes will improve productivity on calls.
The update will allow users an easier way to share content when delivering presentations in Teams, with two new presentation views called Reporter and Side-by-Side helping make presentations more engaging so that speakers can better hold an audience’s attention.