Ever since COVID-19 forced millions of workers to work remotely or out of their homes, collaboration and communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx, Google meet, BlueJeans, Slack, GoToMeeting and others have rolled out new features in what has become a competitive market for those providers.
Many of the updates and new features have been around the number of participants that can join a call, but Microsoft Teams will soon be rolling out a new feature that expands the number of people that can join a text chat to 250.
Currently, that number is capped at 100, according to Petri.
Microsoft’s official Microsoft 365 Roadmap website indicates that the group chat expansion for Microsoft Teams will be rolling out this month.
Sometimes you need to kick off a big project chat with a large group, or organize an ad-hoc discussion with staff at an event, but it is unnecessary to start a new team; perhaps you don’t all work together on a regular basis, or maybe you need a communication channel with a large group of people at an event. Group chats will be able to accommodate up to 250 users.
The update is rolling out now, and all users should have the expanded capacity by the middle of this month.
According to Petri, there are some controls to help keep chats organized. When a chat has more than 20 people, these features are turned off:
- Video and audio calling
- Outlook automatic replies
- Teams status messages
- Typing indicator
- Sharing
- Read receipts
This doesn’t impact max capacity for video or audio calls from private group chats, which is currently 20. Teams meetings, however, allow up to 250 people, which rivals other leaders in the space like Zoom.
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The company has rolled out other improvements, like increasing the number of participants on screen from four to nine.
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