Teams Calendar Peek Gives Quick View to Upcoming Events

Calendar Peeking

Outlook has a calendar peek feature where you can “dock” a calendar view in a small window to be able to see information about upcoming events. The Teams calendar synchronizes information from the Outlook calendar and the default view shows event names, organizers, times, and some basic information. To see more, you’ve got to open individual events. That is, until now as the latest update for the Teams desktop and browser clients include the ability to peek at the essential details of an event.

While double-clicking an event in the Teams calendar, single-clicking (peeking) reveals the event date and time, a join button (for online events), the status and organizer, and a link to chat with participants (Figure 1). If you’re the meeting organizer, you’ll also see a button to edit the event.

Like many good ideas, this is a simple but effective change that improves the usefulness of the Teams calendar. Force of habit means that I’ll continue to organize my days through Outlook, but those who live in Teams will probably like the new peek. I say “probably” because someone always finds faults when user interface changes (quite a few people hate the New conversation button).

Some Delayed Teams Features Now Available

Last month, I wrote about the reasons why Microsoft sometimes delays the delivery of announced Office 365 features. This week, several features rolled out to tenants:

• Language-Aware Spellchecking in Teams: announced in MC217362 on June 26. This feature detects when someone starts to write messages in a different language to the one configured in their profile and offers to switch to that language.
• Speaker attribution: announced in MC219651 on July 31. When you use closed captions in a Teams meeting, speaker attribution means that speaker names show up alongside captions.

Microsoft hasn’t said why these features were delayed, but it’s likely to be due to some bugs that needed to be squashed before general release.

Tasks App Now Generally Available

Finally, Microsoft has completed the initial roll-out of the Tasks app in Teams, so the app is now deemed to be generally available. The next stage is that the app will be renamed from Planner to Tasks by Planner and To Do. More importantly, you’ll soon be able to create a task from Teams chat or channel conversations, which is much more significant than the rebranding exercises Microsoft delights in.

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None of this stuff shows up in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook because its content is focused on what administrators need to know about running a tenant. But it’s good to know when things change, so we document it here.