One minute there were presents under the tree, the next minute Christmas is finished and we’re back at work and looking ahead to what’s coming up!  There are a few Microsoft Updates that I’m really looking forward to seeing: 

• Yay!  A win for the structure of Teams!  An archiving feature for channels is due to start rolling out early in 2024.  Roadmap ID 123769
• Channel Meetings are also due to get the built-in collaborative meeting notes experience made available in standard Teams meetings earlier this year (if you missed out on that, you can read the Insider deep-dive – or Microsoft’s support article on taking meeting notes).  Roadmap ID 167330
• Co-organisers on Teams Webinars will be able edit event details, publish, and cancel the event like the organiser can. So once the co-organizer is added they will have full parity of experience as organiser and control/manage/edit event…. Although I suspect that the list of people registered will still not be available as an ‘attendance’ tab for the co-organisers (and therefore there likely will still be no option for them to ‘download’ the registered attendees prior to the webinar: a bugbear of mine!).  Roadmap ID 168524

A couple of other things I think worth taking note of:

• You only have until 15 April 2024 to make sure all your Stream (Classic) videos have been migrated (any unmigrated videos will be deleted)
• Microsoft are unifying the Contacts experience so if you’re creating Contacts in Teams you’ll be able to see them from Outlook too
• In Microsoft Teams you’ll see Power Automate called Workflows – this doesn’t affect the standalone Power Automate app.  It’s just to unify two existing apps that were available from inside Teams – functionality will all remain the same

Lastly, this year brought a lot of hype around ChatGPT and AI in general.  Next year promises to deliver just as much!  There are so many sessions related to this on the agenda for the Digital Workplace Conference NZ 2024, ranging from Copilot to Power Virtual Agent Chatbots.  I highly recommend you book a seat now so you can keep up with what is sure to be a cracking explosion of knowledge sharing, networking, and ‘aha moments’.  And if that’s not enough to convince you that AI is exciting, my Christmas kitten picture above was created using an AI image generator!

Happy festive times, everyone!