Last week, Microsoft highlighted all the new features that made their way to its Teams service in November. These included scheduled sending for messages, more control over group chat invites, and plenty more. Then, a few days back, a new picture-in-picture mode for iOS devices was discovered as well.
Today, the tech giant has unveiled its latest feature for Teams – communities. Available today for free on all iOS and Android devices, communities will be heading to the desktop soon as well.
The core focus of this enhancement is to provide users the capability to create and collaborate on common community-centric issues such as event planning committees, parent teacher-associations, sports teams, and more. Aside from providing a connected space for such concerns, communities is noted to enable users to:
- Easily post messages to everyone in the group.
- Organize events and add them to the community calendar for everyone to see.
- Share and store documents dedicated to group activity.
- Filter content to quickly access photos, videos, events, and links.
To get started with leveraging the feature, the process of community creation can be initialized through the home screen of the Teams app, with suggested community types being taken into account. Branding elements like group pictures can then be added, before inviting members via their email address or phone numbers, or through a link or QR code. Community owners would have access to various moderation options as well.
Aside from being available on the free variant of Teams, the feature is also available across Teams Essentials (when signed in via a Microsoft account), Microsoft 365 Personal, and Microsoft 365 Family. Interestingly, Meta’s WhatsApp rolled out a communities feature just last month as well.