The Microsoft Teams team was busy over the holidays. On New Year's Eve, a blog post was published detailing all the new Microsoft Teams features from December.
The additions range from being able to pop out core Teams functions in new windows to support for third-party ISV compliance recording at the call queue level.
Microsoft also announced new security features, options for Frontline workers, and listed several new Certfified for Microsoft Teams devices.
The December changes are relatively small when compared to some other months throughout 2025, but they cap a year full of upgrades and improvements to the platform.
Microsoft's Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft Teams, Kerry Perez Heffernan, outlined all the changes. The bullet points below are from Perez Heffernan and I've highlighted some of my favorite new features.
Chat and Collaboration
- Pop out your core Teams functions into a new window
- Joining a private team by code now requires owner approval
Teams chats, calls, calendar events, and activities can now be opened in separate windows. This makes multitasking much easier since you don't have to jump around between different portions of the Teams app to do different tasks.
The change makes it easy to work with different parts of Teams side-by-side, such as going through your call history while looking through your chats. Since the content can be opened in separate windows, you can snap those windows to your desktop and resize them freely.
Meetings, Webinars, and town halls
- Enhancements to Interpreter and multilingual meeting experience
Now, when an Interpreter is enabled within Teams, spoken language is now automatically detected and updated throughout the app. Interpreter, live captions, and live transcription will all reflect the change.
That should save a few steps for people who rely on interpreters and who use multiple languages in meetings.
A nice touch to Teams is that the app will now show a "preparing" status when Interpreter is being initialized. That feature allows meeting participants to know when it's okay to begin.
Teams Phone
- Microsoft 365 Copilot chat in Calls app post-calling experience – Generally available
- Compliance Recording ISV Support for Call Queues in Microsoft Teams Phone
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat can now generate summaries, highlight key points of a meeting, and suggest tasks to do after a meeting wraps up. Teams already had some of those features before, but the post-call Copilot experience is now powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
Admins should experience less fatigue following the addition of third-party ISV compliance recording at the call queue level. Until now, Teams recording policies were specific to individual users, so applying policies broadly took extra work.
Fundamentals and Security
- Tenant-Owned Domain Impersonation Protection for Teams Messaging
A new security feature in Teams identifies if an external user comes from a domain that is impersonating the tenant's domain. Bad actors can impersonate tenants to trick people into sharing sensitive information. The update to Teams should protect more users from that type of phishing attack.
Frontline Worker Solutions
- Frontline Hub
IT admins can now deploy, manage, and monitor frontline Teams experiences through a single hub. The frontline teams page lives with the Teams Admin Center and shows dynamic recommendations based on your workflow.
Certified for Teams Devices
In addition to all the new features for Teams rolling out, several new Certified for Teams devices have become available:
- EPOS IMPACT 500 MS UC ANC WL USB-C+A Headset
- EPOS IMPACT 400 ANC Headset
- Lenovo Webcams: FHD, QHD and 4K Pro
- Lenovo Dual-mode Wireless ANC Headset 6550 (USB-A and USB-C)
- The Yealink MVC S90
- The Yealink S50
- The Yealink MVC S40
Certified for Teams devices meet standards for quality, reliability, and compatibility with Teams. Microsoft considers audio and video quality, device management options, security, and other factors when certifying devices.
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