Tag: Microsoft Teams

Almost overnight, video conferencing has become a big part of our daily life and work. A few weeks in, my team and I at Microsoft have adjusted to the new reality of seeing each other’s homes, complete with dogs, cats, and other family members. Everyone around the world is now working, learning, and connecting with colleagues, friends, and family through the power of technology. From kitchen tables to living room couches, and from home offices doubling as home schools—people are relying on Microsoft Teams to work and learn.

Businesses large and small are depending on Teams for mission-critical work. First responders are using Teams to communicate when lives depend on it. Governments are turning to Teams to move medical supplies to where they are needed most. Doctors and nurses are using it to consult with patients, and researchers are collaborating on it across continents to find a vaccine. And teachers are using Teams to teach students in entirely new ways. Important moments of human connection, achievement, and celebration have all moved online.

Now more than ever, people need to know that their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought. It’s our commitment to you—not only during this challenging time, but always. Here’s how we’re working to earn your trust every day with Microsoft Teams.

We provide privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams

We offer a variety of privacy and security controls to allow you to manage who participates in your meetings and who has access to meeting information.

For example, you decide who from outside your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. You can also remove participants during a meeting, designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants can present content. And with guest access, you can add people from outside your organization but still retain control over your data. Moderation allows you to control who is and isn’t allowed to post and share content. And advanced artificial intelligence (AI) monitors chats to help prevent negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.

When recording a meeting, all participants are notified when a recording starts, and online participants can access our privacy notice directly. Recordings are only available to the people on the call or people invited to the meeting. And recordings are stored in a controlled repository that is protected by permissions and encryption.

We safeguard your privacy by design

When you use Microsoft Teams, you are entrusting us with one of your most valuable assets—your data and personal information. Our approach to privacy is grounded in our commitment to giving you transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of your data. Far from an afterthought, privacy is deeply ingrained in our company philosophy and how we build products. Here are our privacy commitments to you.

• We never use your Teams data to serve you ads.
• We do not track participant attention or multi-tasking in Teams meetings.
• Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
• We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
• You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
• We offer regular transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how we have responded to third-party requests for data.

We protect your identity and account information

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a feature turned on by your IT administrator, protects your username and password by requiring you to provide a second form of verification to prove your identity. This simple, two-step verification process is widely used in many consumer applications today, including banking, and protects you from attacks that take advantage of weak or stolen passwords.

We protect your data and defend against cybersecurity threats

As a leader in security, Microsoft processes more than 8 trillion security signals every day and uses them to proactively protect you from security threats. In Teams, we encrypt data in transit and at rest, storing your data in our secure network of datacenters and using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and desktop sharing.

We meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards

To comply with global, national, regional, and industry-specific regulations, Teams supports more than 90 regulatory standards and laws, including HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, SOC, and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the security of students and children.

For more information on the features we’ve built to deliver on these promises, see our detailed post on privacy and security in Microsoft Teams or refer to our Teams product documentation. And to learn more about our approach to security, compliance, and privacy across all our products, including Teams, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.

No matter how you’re using Teams at this extraordinary time to connect with the people that matter most to you for work and in life, we’re committed to continuing to learn and get better each day as we work to help you keep all your conversations private and secure.

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Teachers are on the frontlines of enabling the sudden shift to remote learning. Within a matter of weeks, educators have had to quickly adapt their engaging, aligned, in-person lessons into online learning for their students. This incredible change has shed light on the inspiring ingenuity, passion, and commitment of those who support our communities.

What we hear from educators is that they need to be able to transition to remote learning quickly, to connect in a community to share best practices, and to learn from each other.

Based on feedback from our Remote Learning Educator Community, we’ve outlined five ways to help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams, a digital hub for communication and collaboration, during remote learning:

1. Connection and collaboration: Use the Teams built-in meetings features to effectively hold classroom meetings, collaborate on virtual whiteboards, and share documents. With assignments, conversations, files, notes, and video calls all pulled together, Teams is a great all-in-one hub for the collaborative classroom. Here is a great Teams for Education Quick Start Guide, and we have new updates rolling out regularly with improvements that have been inspired by educators.
2. Inclusion: In order to ensure learners of all abilities are included, understanding which tools and technologies improve accessibility and foster an inclusive classroom becomes critical. With built-in capabilities like the Immersive Reader, message translation, and Live Captions for meetings, Teams is a non-stigmatizing platform.  
3. Meaningful feedback with rubrics: An important part of remote learning is good teaching practice. Teams Assignments have built-in rubrics. Rubric grading helps increase assignment transparency for students and allows you to give more meaningful feedback. These feedback mechanisms not only help students learn and improve their work, but they’re also a consistent and transparent way for teachers to grade. This has been an incredibly popular feature with both educators and students, and with rubrics now easily sharable, we have seen this practice take off in Teams.
4. Staff and learning communities: Saving time, being more organized, and collaborating more effectively during remote learning is critical. With Teams being a hub for education, a core part of this also includes built-in Staff teams and Professional Learning Community (PLC) teams to go along with Class Teams. This provides a one-stop shop for educators. Staff Teams and PLC teams allow educators and staff to easily communicate and collaborate during remote learning. We’ve seen many three-ring binders tossed with the paperless use of Staff and PLC teams in schools.
5. OneNote Class Notebooks, built into Teams: OneNote is a multifaceted note-taking tool that is built into Teams and can be used for a variety of lessons and activities. With OneNote Class Notebooks, you have a personal workspace for every student, a content library for handouts, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities. You can also embed all sorts of interactive apps, lessons, and content onto the OneNote page. Especially with remote learning, paper notes and handouts are difficult to work with, and having a digital notebook for the class is a natural fit.

Remote learning is a journey for all of us, and we are grateful to the diligence and creativity of educators during this time. Please visit our Remote Learning Page (higher education here) and (K-12 here) for all of our resources. Thank you for all you have done for students around the world. We are looking forward to continuing to work with you.

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For weeks now, students and teachers have been settling into the uncharted routine of distance learning. Today I want to thank all of the educators who are connecting classrooms and classmates together in the sudden shift to remote learning. This change requires everyone working together and is unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern history of education. We’ve seen countries, school districts and universities move rapidly into remote learning environments with Microsoft Teams being used in 175 countries by 183,000 institutions. ^[1]

For example, entire countries like the United Arab Emirates have engaged in distance learning, and today more than 350,000 students log in to Microsoft Teams each day to engage in lessons. In Hong Kong, teachers are using a variety of methods to ensure learning never stops: including live lessons, Bingo vocabulary games in OneNote and posting homework assignments within Teams.

In India, teachers are getting creative with document sharing and virtual whiteboards in Teams to keep students engaged.  As Rashima V Varma, the head of The Ardee School in New Friends Colony in New Delhi explained: “When you are teaching in a classroom, you can look at your students and get a sense of whether they are engaged or not. In online classes, teachers cannot control the environment—students can log off from the class. Teachers needed to completely reimagine their classes. They have to build in a lot of interactive elements to ensure that the students are engaged in the teaching learning process.” 

Institutions like the University of Bologna, a 932-year-old university in Italy that just moved all of its 80,000 students to a remote learning environment on Teams, are undergoing massive transformations in incredibly short time spans.

And then, there’s great stories of change and adaptability happening here in the U.S. Schools and districts like the New York City Department of Education (1.1M students) to O’Dea High School right here in Seattle, are using tools like Teams to drive student engagement and connection.

We are relying on technology to support and enable inclusive learning more than ever, and students, parents and teachers want confidence that their interactions are private and secure. Last week, my colleague Jared Spataro summarized our approach to privacy and security in Microsoft Teams.  Whether through privacy and security controls, protecting identity and data, and ensuring we meet regulatory and industry standards, our first and foremost priority is helping educators maintain a safe and inclusive classroom. Because in the end, this technology is all about supporting people.

It is important to realize what is happening at the human level – and the perseverance and creativity we are seeing as teachers, students and caregivers tackle new situations unlike anything they’ve ever seen.  

In Japan, an elementary school graduation happened entirely in Minecraft, where each student and each teacher attended as avatars. Within Flipgrid, we are seeing teachers and students use short videos to connect across all subjects from science, to talent shows, to taking the Hippocratic oath. These touchpoints go beyond learning and return to our basic need for human connection and the fundamental relationship of teacher and student.

Moving to distance learning is more than going online, and maintaining human connections is more important than ever. One day, when we look back on these difficult times, our greatest achievement will have been in how we supported each other. We are so grateful to the talented educators who are working so hard to ensure that their students can thrive. Thank you to all of you. We are looking forward to continuing on this journey together. For more information on remote learning and resources, please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/remote-learning

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^[1] Institutions can include individual schools, universities, districts, states/regions and countries. 

“Nothing can stop a team.” If you said that to me a few months back, I would have probably thought: Yes. Teamwork is powerful. At Microsoft we’re big believers in the power of teams, and we understand that successful teamwork today requires so much more than just connecting during meetings or over chat. It’s about sharing crucial knowledge quickly to keep work moving forward while also keeping everyone up to speed. We built Microsoft Teams as a place where customers could call, meet, chat, and collaborate all in one place—so that teams always have the critical context they need to work together, even when they need to work apart.

Fast-forward to a world of remote everything. Teachers connecting with students in virtual classrooms. Doctors and nurses taking essential consultations online. Factory-floor managers pivoting to produce much-needed medical supplies. And they’re using Teams to do it. We have watched as millions of you lean into, and build upon, the Teams technology. So now, at this extraordinary inflection point in human history, when I hear the words “nothing can stop a team,” I think: Wow, yes. What a profound and moving truth. And thanks to our customers, we get to see that truth play out every day.

Today, we are debuting a series of stories from customers who embody the spirit of unstoppable teams. This first video is unlike any other we’ve created. It had no director. No crew. No just-right lighting or fancy mics. It’s just real people, connecting over real Teams meetings and calls, to share the impactful work they’ve been doing since they’ve had to work apart. For me, their stories capture the essence of why Microsoft exists in the first place: to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As a platform and tools company, we’re here to help educators and healthcare professionals connect with students and patients from anywhere, to help multinationals and small businesses stay productive, and to help people everywhere keep reaching higher—even in difficult times.

A bit more about the organizations we featured:

• Founded in 1088, the University of Bologna is the oldest university in the western world. And innovation is at the heart of their continued success over the centuries. “Unibo,” as insiders call it, first reached out to Microsoft at the end of February to ask for support in bringing their classes online to help create learning continuity for the students. In its first week, the university went live with 50 percent of the classes, and by the second week they were at 100 percent. They now reach 87,000 students with more than 3,600 courses online, with positive feedback from IT, faculty, and the students. The school reports that the response was extraordinary, with students and teachers turning to social media to spread the news. As one professor put it on Twitter: “This was big.”
• The Metropolitan Police Service is running its London COVID-19 technology response on Teams. Across the organization, from uniform police patrol officers to forensic teams, up through command teams and across specialists and operational support, the Metropolitan Police Service is now “living on Teams” to keep each other connected and running smoothly so it can keep London safe.
• St. Luke’s University Health Network serves approximately 1 million people across 10 counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In a matter of weeks, they transformed the way they work and deliver patient care through Teams and since April 1 have scheduled over 17,000 patient virtual visits. This allowed them to continue critical outpatient visits while protecting both patients and physicians from COVID-19 exposure and preserving valuable resources like masks and gloves. Tablets have also been installed in patient rooms so providers could engage with infected patients via Teams, minimizing exposure while still allowing for face-to-face connections between patients and caregivers.
• In response to COVID-19 L’Oréal quickly adapted a plant in France to produce hand sanitizer and then expanded the effort to 28 of its factories across the globe. Teams allowed for this to happen rapidly with efficient and effective coordination and communication. L’Oréal has started to donate thousands of liters of hand sanitizer to hospitals, pharmacies, care personnel staff, and retailers’ staff around the world who need it to operate. “Teams technology made it possible to work remotely in all continuity to implement quickly our new priorities,” added Barbara Lavernos, EVP Technologies and Operations.

Hearing these customers’ stories, I am blown away by the sheer strength of our human will to connect and keep work moving. They come from different countries and very different industries, but together they represent millions of people around the world who are discovering that nothing can stop a team. At Microsoft, we are committed to building the tools that help keep them working together, through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.

As I write this, millions of people around the world are adjusting to full-time remote work and learning. Working remotely full-time can challenge us as humans because we are hardwired for connection. Here at Microsoft, we did a study a couple years back that asked 14,000 people in seven countries to name the form of communication that makes them happiest. No surprise, in-person meetings ranked number one over email, chat, or texting across all generations. In a moment where meeting face-to-face is impossible, how do we continue to connect to one another?

Over the past weeks, we’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are connecting during meetings in Microsoft Teams. We’ve seen bosses show up to meetings as virtual potato heads and team stand-ups turn delightfully silly. From teams of workers sharing shift updates to students and teachers connecting in virtual classrooms and CEOs conducting town hall Q&As with thousands of employees, we’re all finding new ways to come together when we have to work and learn apart.

This idea is reflected in the sheer number of meetings happening in Microsoft Teams each day. We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day,¹ a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. And as students and teachers turn to Teams for distance learning, there are 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education.²

To explore changing trends in remote work and learning further, today we’re releasing the first report from our new Work Trend Index. Through ongoing research, we will explore how work is changing via surveys and interviews, and by looking at trends in the way people interact with our productivity tools.

This first report explores how people are learning to connect as a team when they need to work apart. Our goal in sharing these insights is twofold. First, while safeguarding personal and organizational data, we want to help our customers learn from the bright spots and plan for the future. Second, we aim to use these insights to guide innovation in our products so that we can continue to build the best possible experiences.

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Key findings

As the world works in Microsoft 365, searches in Bing, and connects on LinkedIn, it creates trillions of signals—like emails, meetings, searches, and posts—that form the Microsoft Graph, one of the largest graphs of human interactions at work in the world. Trends in this data provide a unique view into the world’s productivity patterns.

Microsoft takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal data and organization-identifying data, such as company name, from the data before using it to produce reports. We never use customer content such as information within an email, chat, document or meeting to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends from aggregated data from the Microsoft Graph.

People are finding a human connection through video

Researchers like Dr. Fiona Kerr have found that eye contact and physical connection with another human increases dopamine and decreases the stress hormone cortisol. Her research shows that you can even physically calm someone down simply by looking them in the eye. So as the world works remotely, it is no surprise people are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more³than before many of us began working from home full-time. We’ve also seen total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March.⁴

As we looked at countries with the most active Teams users, we saw people in Norway and the Netherlands turn on video most, with about 60 percent of calls including video. People in Australia use video in meetings 57 percent of the time, Italy 53 percent, Chile 52 percent, Switzerland 51 percent, and Spain 49 percent. Meanwhile people in the U.K., Canada, and Sweden use video 47 percent of the time and people in Mexico and the U.S. use it 41 percent and 38 percent respectively.

Who doesn’t use video as much and why? People in India use video in 22 percent of meetings, Singapore 26 percent, South Africa 36 percent, France 37 percent, and Japan 39 percent. This may be attributed in part to less access to devices and stable internet in some regions such as India and South Africa.

We’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are using video to connect during this time. For example, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, the largest hospital in Wenzhou, China, deployed Microsoft Teams to enable healthcare staff inside the quarantined section of the hospital to communicate with non-quarantined staff, allowing for secure coordination of patient care while ensuring the health and safety of their workforce.

While there is no true replacement for in-person collaboration, we’re working harder than ever to quickly innovate to decrease pain points, increase human connection, and make work a bit more fun.

• Custom backgrounds, which allow you to replace your background in Teams meetings with a fresh and bright home office, for example, is now generally available in Teams. This feature builds upon background blur, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to blur the environment behind you. In the future, we will also include the ability to upload your own custom images.
• To make video calls more inclusive, the raise hand feature we announced last month is rolling out globally this month. It lets meeting participants indicate they have something to say during a meeting by clicking on a hand-raise icon in the meeting control bar.
• Today, we are releasing the ability for meeting organizers to end a meeting for all participants with the click of a button. Meeting organizers can now find an option to “end meeting” in the meeting control bar options.
• Meeting organizers, especially teachers, often need to know who joined their Teams meetings. This month, you will be able to download a participant report, found in the participant list, that includes join and leave times for participants.
• Later this year, we will bring real-time noise suppression, which uses AI to reduce distracting background noise such as loud typing or a barking dog in Teams meetings.

People are using video to connect in new ways

As companies adapt to full-time remote work, we’re seeing more leaders use virtual town halls to connect employees on a large-scale basis. Large conferences and events are also moving online. We’re also seeing more people take advantage of the ability to record Teams meetings—such as a teacher recording a lesson for students or a worker recording a meeting for an invited colleague to view later.

Microsoft Stream is the service that powers live events and meeting recordings in Teams. As a result of customers moving events online, the number of Stream videos in Teams per week has increased over five times in the last month with hundreds of hours of video uploaded per minute.⁵

Nuance, which uses AI to solve some of the world’s toughest problems in healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail, turned their global R&D conference—planned to take place in Montreal—virtual in a matter of days. Organizers connected hundreds of attendees with a Teams channel and PDF agenda that linked to each Teams event session. Last year Nuance spent approximately $700,000 on the conference and this year the cost was close to zero, with no carbon impact from global travel.

People are embracing a more flexible work schedule

Productivity is different for everyone. The so-called larks of the world are more productive in the morning, while night owls are more creative and focused in the evening. Our data shows that a more flexible workday created by remote work is allowing people to work when it’s best for them.

From March 1–31, the average time between a person’s first use of Teams and last use of Teams each day increased by over one hour. This data doesn’t necessarily mean people are working more hours per day, rather that they are breaking up the day in a way that works for their personal productivity or makes space for obligations outside of work.

Countries and industries most impacted are turning to mobile to connect with their team

As organizations aim to continue operations, we’ve seen a considerable increase in Teams usage on mobile devices such as a phone or tablet. The number of weekly Teams mobile users grew more than 300 percent from early February to March 31. Some of our largest usage increases have been from customers in industries most impacted by the outbreak. With 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education, we’ve seen large increases in usage of Teams on mobile devices from customers in Higher Education and Primary and Secondary Education (K-12). We’ve also seen a notable increase from customers in Government-related industries.

When you consider this from a capacity perspective, it’s not just about the number of new users, but the amount they are using it each week—what we refer to as engagement. Engagement in Teams on mobile devices has increased exponentially in several regions most impacted by the crisis including Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France.

One example of a school transitioning to remote learning is Durham University in North East England. Classes had to move online and staff needed to work remotely so that the university could continue to serve its students, academics, and professional services during the outbreak. To respond effectively to the developing crisis, Durham University scaled up its use of Microsoft Teams to add to its online learning toolset, maintain community, and make it possible to collaborate and communicate remotely and securely on the device that works best for their students and staff.

This moment will change the way we work and connect with each other forever

Trends in the data and conversations with our customers show us the world is realizing we can effectively connect across distances in a way some never thought possible before. For example, despite some employees returning to work, there are still more than two times the number new Teams users each day in China compared to end of January.⁶ The number of daily active Teams users in China also continues to grow week over week. We can also learn from customers who are showing it’s possible to continue their mission while forced to work apart.

For instance, Mercy Housing, a non-profit committed to creating affordable housing options, implemented technology, including Microsoft Teams, to maintain continuity in the face of COVID-19. “The capability to conduct virtual meetings and collaborate on documents in a single place has been instrumental as many of our 1,600 employees shifted to remote work practically overnight. In some cases, our resident services staff is exploring the use of Teams video meetings to maintain a human connection with our residents, which is so important to supporting mental and emotional well-being in a time like this. This remote teamwork has allowed us to help our 45,000 vulnerable residents stay in their homes,” accounted Gunnar Tande, CIO and Senior Vice President, Technology & Strategy, Mercy Housing.

Even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Salvation Army is continuing efforts to address the needs of those they serve, including housing the homeless and feeding the hungry. Tim Schaal, Information Technology Director for The Salvation Army United States Western Territory, noted that despite the swift transition to remote work for thousands of employees, “Microsoft Teams allowed us to continue providing critical assistance in cities and towns, big and small, throughout the thirteen western states.”

We are so glad to see that our technology is helping these organizations continue their important work. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And at a moment like this, when we are all adjusting to a new normal, it’s never felt more important to help connect more people and keep more organizations up and running with secure tools. Although the way we work has changed, our customers show us every day that our drive to connect to one another is so often stronger than the circumstances that keep us apart.

¹2.7 billion meeting minutes experienced in Teams on March 31, 2020.
²Tenants often represent school districts with dozens or hundreds of schools.
³Proportion of weekly calls and meetings with video grew from 21 percent to 43 percent, March 2–March 31.
⁴Data reflects increase in total weekly video calls in Teams from March 2–March 31.
⁵Data reflects weekly hours of videos being sent from March 1–March 28.
⁶Data reflects increase from last week in January to third week in March.

Almost overnight, video conferencing has become a big part of our daily life and work. A few weeks in, my team and I at Microsoft have adjusted to the new reality of seeing each other’s homes, complete with dogs, cats, and other family members. Everyone around the world is now working, learning, and connecting with colleagues, friends, and family through the power of technology. From kitchen tables to living room couches, and from home offices doubling as home schools—people are relying on Microsoft Teams to work and learn.

Businesses large and small are depending on Teams for mission-critical work. First responders are using Teams to communicate when lives depend on it. Governments are turning to Teams to move medical supplies to where they are needed most. Doctors and nurses are using it to consult with patients, and researchers are collaborating on it across continents to find a vaccine. And teachers are using Teams to teach students in entirely new ways. Important moments of human connection, achievement, and celebration have all moved online.

Now more than ever, people need to know that their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought. It’s our commitment to you—not only during this challenging time, but always. Here’s how we’re working to earn your trust every day with Microsoft Teams.

We provide privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams

We offer a variety of privacy and security controls to allow you to manage who participates in your meetings and who has access to meeting information.

For example, you decide who from outside your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. You can also remove participants during a meeting, designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants can present content. And with guest access, you can add people from outside your organization but still retain control over your data. Moderation allows you to control who is and isn’t allowed to post and share content. And advanced artificial intelligence (AI) monitors chats to help prevent negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.

When recording a meeting, all participants are notified when a recording starts, and online participants can access our privacy notice directly. Recordings are only available to the people on the call or people invited to the meeting. And recordings are stored in a controlled repository that is protected by permissions and encryption.

We safeguard your privacy by design

When you use Microsoft Teams, you are entrusting us with one of your most valuable assets—your data and personal information. Our approach to privacy is grounded in our commitment to giving you transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of your data. Far from an afterthought, privacy is deeply ingrained in our company philosophy and how we build products. Here are our privacy commitments to you.

• We never use your Teams data to serve you ads.
• We do not track participant attention or multi-tasking in Teams meetings.
• Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
• We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
• You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
• We offer regular transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how we have responded to third-party requests for data.

We protect your identity and account information

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a feature turned on by your IT administrator, protects your username and password by requiring you to provide a second form of verification to prove your identity. This simple, two-step verification process is widely used in many consumer applications today, including banking, and protects you from attacks that take advantage of weak or stolen passwords.

We protect your data and defend against cybersecurity threats

As a leader in security, Microsoft processes more than 8 trillion security signals every day and uses them to proactively protect you from security threats. In Teams, we encrypt data in transit and at rest, storing your data in our secure network of datacenters and using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and desktop sharing.

We meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards

To comply with global, national, regional, and industry-specific regulations, Teams supports more than 90 regulatory standards and laws, including HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, SOC, and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the security of students and children.

For more information on the features we’ve built to deliver on these promises, see our detailed post on privacy and security in Microsoft Teams or refer to our Teams product documentation. And to learn more about our approach to security, compliance, and privacy across all our products, including Teams, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.

No matter how you’re using Teams at this extraordinary time to connect with the people that matter most to you for work and in life, we’re committed to continuing to learn and get better each day as we work to help you keep all your conversations private and secure.

This week marks the third anniversary of Microsoft Teams. It’s been an incredible three years, and I’m inspired to see the way organizations across the globe are using Teams to transform the way they work. Today, I’m going to share some new Teams capabilities across a few different aspects of the Teams experience, many with a tie to meetings.

But first I want to talk to you about the moment we all find ourselves in. And I want to recognize the organizations, employees, and students across the globe who have been thrown into remote work and remote learning in an effort to keep themselves and the people around them healthy and safe.

Adjusting to remote work and learning

Around the world, millions of people have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. It has affected how we work, how we socialize, our family life, and our community life. Here in the Puget Sound, we’ve asked about 50,000 Microsoft employees not to commute to work, and they are joined by tens of thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide who are now working remotely. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes it’s been downright disorienting. But our team is still connecting. Still collaborating. Still getting our work done.

In the face of COVID-19, there are countless stories from customers who are using Teams to connect and thrive in inspiring ways. A professor at University of Bologna in Italy shared on Twitter how the school moved 90 percent of courses online to Teams within four days, which is definitely a first in the university’s 900-plus year history. Doctors at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania will use Teams for videoconferencing with patients, especially those who are most vulnerable to coronavirus, as a way to protect both patients and healthcare providers. And the City of Osaka in Japan is using Teams to conduct orientations and trainings for hundreds of new incoming employees in April.

Stories like these are playing out in countries the world over. We believe that this sudden, globe-spanning move to remote work will be a turning point in how we work and learn. Already, we are seeing how solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration have become central to the way we work. We have seen an unprecedented spike in Teams usage, and now have more than 44 million daily users,* a figure that has grown by 12 million in just the last seven days. And those users have generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams each day this week.

It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.

Transforming the way people work

Over the last three years, thousands of organizations, small and large—including 93 of the Fortune 100—have discovered how Teams can be their hub for teamwork, helping them to stay connected and engaged. Industry leading organizations are rolling out Teams enterprise-wide. In fact, 20 customers have more than 100,000 employees actively using Teams, including Ernst & Young, SAP, Pfizer, and Continental AG, as well as Accenture, which has 440,000 employees actively using Teams.

What’s new in Teams

We continue to invest in experiences that will make it easier for teams to communicate and collaborate. The new capabilities we are announcing today reflect our commitment to two things: building the very best online meeting experience for our customers; and bringing technological solutions to traditionally underserved professionals, including Firstline and healthcare workers.

• We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.
• In large meetings, it can sometimes be difficult for remote participants to chime in when they have something to say. The raise hand feature lets anyone in the meeting send a visual signal that they have something to say.

• Industrial workers need to communicate and collaborate effectively while staying safe. Through a new integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted devices, Firstline Workers will be able to access information and communicate hands-free with remote experts from their job site.

• Conducting B2C virtual appointments is a common requirement for situations like healthcare patient visits, client meetings, or job candidate interviews. Announced earlier this month, the Bookings app in Teams makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct virtual appointments.
• Teams will soon enable you to pop out chats into a separate window to help you streamline your workflow and move more easily between ongoing conversations.
• Offline and low-bandwidth support lets you read chat messages and write responses, even without an internet connection, making it easier for you to move things forward no matter where you are.
• We are also expanding the Teams devices ecosystem, with new devices certified for Teams. The Yealink VC210, now generally available, is the first collaboration bar certified for Teams, and brings together speakers, microphones, a camera, and a native Teams experience to deliver a meeting experience for smaller conference rooms that is simple to install and easy to manage. In addition, the Bose Noise Cancelling headphone 700 UC is available for purchase in late spring.
• We’re pleased to introduce Microsoft 365 Business Voice in the U.S., a new offering for small-and mid-sized businesses that makes Teams a complete phone system, as well as a new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan lineup that will include additional licensing options for Firstline Workers.
  

Unless otherwise stated above, the new capabilities will be available later this year.

Since we launched Teams three years ago, it has evolved to become the hub for teamwork—a place where you can meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in one place. We will continue to improve and expand experiences for all workers to be as productive and connected as possible. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to push people everywhere into remote work and learning, enabling remote work and remote learning has never felt more important, and we are grateful for the opportunity to stand by our customers at such an extraordinary time.

*We define daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. Passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app are not included.