Live Caption (English) Coming to Teams soon

Microsoft is releasing a new feature in Teams called "Live captioning". This enables the end-user to turn on speech to text for their meetings. The message was recently distributed in the O365 Admin portal and is mentioned as roadmap feature 52817,

If you are a user, you need to know this isn't automatically turned on, but yout have to select it from the "call bar".

If you are an admin, you might want to know you can control this feature on a global or per policy basis by the guidelines in the following article at docs.

Through powershell, you can do the following:

- If you want to disable the option of live captions for Teams meeting attendees, run this command in PowerShell: PolicyName -LiveCaptionsEnabledType Disabled>

- If you want to re-enable the option of live captions for Teams meeting attendees, run this command in PowerShell: PolicyName -LiveCaptionsEnabledType DisabledUserOverride>

- Where PolicyName is any custom policy you may have created. Global would refer to tenant-wide global policy.

Pinned channels soon coming to Microsoft Teams

Here is a feature I'm looking forward to.
It will soon be possible to organize your channels by pinning the most important (to you) ones. Roadmap item 55369 is "just around the corner", and admins have been notified in the O365 message center.

According to the message in the admin portal, we should all see this by the end of October.

Testing the Sennheiser 660 MS - Can I finally travel with just one headset?

For years now, I have traveled with two headsets . I always have my trusted Bose headset in order to shut out unwanted noise, and comfortably listen to music or watch something on my mobile device. Bose is in my opinion the best headset on the market for this very reason. However, the Bose headset is really bad when it comes to speech in modern collaboration tools like Teams. And since I do a lot of meetings on the road, I always bring a second headset for that purpose.

I was hoping the Plantronics 8200 UC would solve my problem, and for two years it has been my preferred office and UC headset. The Call quality, the ANC and the music quality was really impressing. The music part can never compare to a headset like Bose, but it was close enough. However, the 8200 is quite big and bulky. This makes it slightly uncomfortable to use when traveling.

Enter the Sennheiser MB 660 MS. PeBeCom have generously given me a device to test, and I can honestly say I am impressed. The quality of voice is at par with the 8200, and the music quality is even better due to the different modes you can easily switch between. I have to say I think the noise cancellation is a bit better in the 8200, but where the 8200 is big and bulky the 660 is smaller, lighter and it fits my head a lot better.

With the 660 I have finally found one headset I can use for travelling and voice/video calls. My backpack just got a bit lighter, and I have one less device to pull out of the bag at security. I will probably still use my Bose on long haul flights and personal trips, but this is when I only care about the music and I don't want to work :)