This week marks the second anniversary of the worldwide launch of Microsoft Teams. And, we are celebrating in style: for the second year in a row, Teams won the Best in Show award at the Enterprise Connect event in Orlando, Florida, in recognition for its vision for making communication and collaboration easier for the entire workforce.   

Over the past two years, Teams has grown significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage, as the hub for teamwork that brings people together and fosters a culture of engagement and inclusion.  

Microsoft Teams is improving workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps. Today, we’re unveiling new capabilities in Teams that make meetings more inclusive and effective while delivering new levels of security and compliance:  

1. Customized backgrounds take our intelligent background blur technology further, allowing participants to select a custom background, such as a company logo or an office environment when working from home, to appear behind them during a meeting or video call.  
2. Content cameras and Intelligent Capture in Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon support an additional camera for capturing content, such as information on analog whiteboards. Using any USB camera, Microsoft Teams Rooms leverages Microsoft’s new Intelligent Capture processing to capture, focus, resize, and enhance whiteboard images and text.  
3. Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams meetings provides an infinite digital canvas for meeting participants to work together directly in Teams. Whether you choose to participate from the meeting room or remotely, Whiteboard in Teams enables everyone to actively participate in the conversation.  
4. Live captions make your Teams meetings more inclusive for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, or have different levels of language proficiency, or are connecting from a loud location.   
5. Secure private channels allow you to customize which members of the team can see conversations and files associated with a channel. You can restrict channel participation and exposure when needed without having to create separate teams to limit visibility.  
6. Information barriers avoid conflicts of interest within your organization by limiting which individuals can communicate and collaborate with each other in Microsoft Teams.  
7. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in chats and conversations enables customers to detect, automatically protect, and screen for sensitive information in chats and channel conversations.
8. Live events in Microsoft 365 enables anyone to create live and on-demand events that deliver compelling communications to employees, customers and partners.  

 All around the world, in businesses of every size and industry, people are using Teams as their hub for teamwork:  

NASCAR racing team Hendrick Motorsports gains competitive edge

Legendary race team Hendrick Motorsports chose Teams as the hub for its race communications and decision-making. While the cars speed along the racetrack, race engineers, mechanical experts, and strategists take their positions in the Team Operations Center in Concord, North Carolina—hundreds of miles away. They gather and analyze massive amounts of data and use Teams to communicate in real-time with the team at the track.  

Razer wins in the gaming industry with constant, clear communication  

Razer dominates the fast-moving gaming lifestyle industry where speed of execution and quality keeps them ahead. Managing dual headquarters in San Francisco and Singapore and an international team spread across the globe, Razer requires the best tools for rapid communication, fast decision making, and real-time collaboration. They chose Teams to meet this need and gain a competitive advantage in this highly competitive industry. 

These are just a few examples of how Microsoft Teams is delivering an intelligent workplace for everyone — whether you’re a team at headquarters, a remote employee working from home, or a Firstline Worker serving customers each day.