Microsoft Teams Insider

Microsoft Teams Monthly Update - November 2025

• Tom Arbuthnot

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MVP Tom Arbuthnot shares all the latest Microsoft Teams and Copilot news and announcements in less than 15 minutes for November 2025.
Many thanks to Landis for their continued support.


PowerPoint Deck

  • Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Changes
  • Microsoft Earnings Numbers (FY26 Q1)
  • Teams Mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot
  • Teams Channel Agents
  • Teams Chat with Anyone
  • 1080p 4Mbps Town Halls
  • Copilot Researcher with Computer User
  • Microsoft Teams Rooms New Features
  • Teams Devices News
  • Events


Briefings

Teams Insider Podcasts

 Hi and welcome back to the podcast. This is the audio of my monthly Teams update. Everything you need to know in under 15 minutes. If you want to see the full video and slides, you can catch over on LinkedIn or X or on Empowering Cloud along with the full PowerPoint deck and all the links. Hope you find it useful.

On with the show.

 Microsoft Teams monthly update November, 2025. Many thanks to Landis who are this month's sponsor. Really appreciate all their support of the community. Landis have a great extend and unified certified contact center. Also attendant and lots of AI integrations. They will be at Ignite in a couple of weeks along with uh, lots of other people.

They've got stand there. They're also announcing a new partner program, so if you're heading to Ignite, do check them out. We are pre Microsoft Ignite. There's quite a few team sessions there. I've got a lot of interviews lined up. Gonna be a really great show, but still there's a lot going on in our space.

There's some huge news with Microsoft and OpenAI and we'll talk about the implications of that. There's some new teams features, uh, new teams and Copilot features and a lot of rooms and town hall stuff as well. So let's jump in. First off, we haven't been to Empowering.Cloud recently. We've got some great briefings posted.

Uh, I talked about Landis and their new AI capabilities. We have four demos in that AI session with them. There we talked about the teams pro management portal AI with Alvin and Andrew. Really interesting. Uh, there's an album there, um, on what's going on today and also a bit of roadmap and what some of the kind of challenges of working with LLMs are and what some of the futures look like about going proactive.

Really interesting session. Um, also teams, channel agents, which we'll talk about more in a minute. And on the Copilot side, Copilot agents from No Code to Pro Code are really good primer on kind of all your options. And on the podcast, some really great conversations. As always, great insights from IQVIA on 650 teams rooms globally and scaling to standards.

Some great insights from a partner point of view on Copilot. And, uh, if you are in the kind of, uh, iOS, uh, apple, Mac world. Really enjoyed that session with Hari and Avinash on. All that's going on with teams and Apple and kind of how they stay up to date and, and think about the Apple products of teams in the clients, the capabilities, the features.

So yeah, really great sessions. Hope you're enjoying those. You've got any questions or feedback on those, do let me know. So first up, this is kind of, uh, meta news. So first up, this is kind of big news across all of Microsoft, so I won't go back through the history we talked about it before, but obviously Microsoft, uh, put a lot of investment into OpenAI and Microsoft essentially.

Um, and essentially OpenAI had to come to an agreement with Microsoft to move into a new type of company beyond kind of a, uh, a non-for-profit into a for-profit. So public benefit corporation is what they've gone towards. The punchline is Microsoft now holds a 27% stake in OpenAI, which is valued at somewhere like around 135 billion.

So, uh, on paper, a, a massive win from the amount of money they've invested. And that money has largely gone into Azure compute as well. So kind of a win-win there. Um, OpenAI has committed to another 250 billion of Azure compute, but they have dropped the Azure gets the first chance to take compute options.

So previously part of the joint agreement was. OpenAI had to go to Azure first, and if Azure didn't want it, then they'd go to other partners. Now they can go to other partners and we've already seen them announce, say, a big investment on the AWS side as well. But continuing to use Azure as a big partner.

And most importantly for us, Microsoft now has rights to all of OpenAI's IP and models through to 2032, including anything that gets classified as verified. A GI. So Microsoft have kind of another seven years of roadmap of being able to get all that IP and integrate into all of the Microsoft products.

Um, obviously there'll be some kind of negotiation near the time there as to what they do, but seven years is a long way out, particularly in ai. So for, for the foreseeable, Microsoft will continue to get access to all those models and to integrate them into all the products. And anything we see OpenAI doing, you can expect Microsoft to get the same IP to bring it into Copilot and the Microsoft AI portfolio.

Just after that announcement, we got Microsoft earnings as well. I always take a look at the numbers. We didn't get anything kind of super interesting in terms of M365 numbers. Uh, we got a billion monthly active users on intra. Um, but that is any user signing into Entra. So that is probably guests and consumer and everything else.

Just a, a huge number. Um, 900 million monthly active users of AI features across all our products. So that is. Anything Microsoft have that has AI in it. So Copilot, consumer Copilot chat, GitHub, Copilot, anything that can claim AI windows, no doubt. Um, for that 900 million users, we got 150 million in the first party family of copilots.

So that's bringing in a bit to things like GitHub Copilot the M365 Copilots Copilot Chat. Um, GitHub Copilot is the most popular AI pair programmer with 28, uh, sorry, 26 million users. Um, tens of millions of Microsoft 365 users using Copilot chat. Um, so sub a hundred million. Um, and there's, you know, 440, 450 million Microsoft, 365 users.

So still some adoption work to do there, considering that is in the box. Um, and some kind of vanity numbers around Copilot agents increasing, but no actuals and the revenue numbers . Huge increases. Uh, they're doing really well off the back of this AI motion and AI investment in terms of revenue and operating income, but equally, they are spending a hell of a lot on infrastructure as well.

So no new numbers for teams, active users for M365 active users or anything like that. Uh, but nonetheless, we'll keep an eye on those earning announcements and see if we get any more specific numbers next quarter

onto the teams news. For the seventh year running,

microsoft are a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. They are fully top right there and you can see some of the other players. Uh, there's a link here for, uh, the original blog from Microsoft and a Gartner link to the full report via Microsoft. Always interesting to have a look. As I read this back this year, it was, it was really obvious to me how much this is weighted towards.

Telephony in the world. . I wonder now how much this report has to pivot towards considering ai, AI workflows, AI integrations, not in just in Microsoft Teams, but in all these platforms.

As we move into an AI world, that is gonna be a key decision for customers in terms of how well does my UCAS integrate with my other. Business workflows and my AI and my agents. But nonetheless, congratulations to Microsoft. Seven years running. Really impressive. Showing from, from the whole team

a new Copilot mode called teams mode.

Um, I don't know if I can really call this a mode as such, but essentially this is quite clever. If you start in Microsoft 3, 6, 5 Copilot and you are having a conversation one-to-one, you can jump that conversation into a regular teams chat. Bring the context with you so the rest of the, the relevant chat and start a group conversation so you can kind of jump from single player to multiplayer or, and this is a bit more interesting, I think you can be in a regular teams chat and you can bring Copilot into that chat as an agent, like a user.

You can talk to, ask questions, but everybody in the chat can engage and have context. So this does require people who want to engage with Copilot, having the M365 Copilot license. Other people in the chat or channel can see the replies, but they can't engage with it yet. Um, just from a licensing point of view.

But this is kind of bringing Copilot directly into the chat workflow rather than having it off to the side as a single player experience, bringing it in as a multiplayer experience. I talked about this at the top. I think we talked about last month. It had just been announced, but we do now have a full briefing on teams.

Channel agents. Really interesting session from Sandhya. She gives a bit of a demo. She talks about some of the roadmap and kind of what the objectives are behind channel agents. Uh, also interesting. They just announced on the roadmap that MCP connectors will be coming to channel agents, which I think is a really strong use case.

If you've got a channel dedicated to your development backlog or your support tickets or whatever it may be, having an MCP, which is a way to connect to third party systems, allows you to bring that information into that channel along with the Copilot agent. So it's still early days on this. Still a lot of testing.

It's in public preview. Microsoft are really keen on feedback

. This is a feature that's probably got some of the most interest recently.

Chat with anyone. Uh, essentially the concept here is if you start a chat in teams with somebody, it will look them up to see if they are also a teams user and provided your organizations both allow chat between the two organizations, so that can be open by default or closed by default. Then the chat goes on.

If they don't have a teams account, it will essentially send them an email. And give them a link to chat with you as a guest, not a guest in the sense of they're a guest on your tenant, just a guest user web experience so they can keep the chat going. Uh, it'd be interesting to see from a user experience point of view how this integrates with.

The kind of compliance policies of Closed Federation, open Federation, and having an approved list or a denial list. Uh, it does say it will respect all those boundaries, but hopefully for your typical user, this will just reduce the friction of I want to chat with somebody. I don't need to know if they've got an account or they haven't got an account.

They will just get an invite to have that conversation. I haven't had hands on with this. This is going to be on by default, but administrators can disable it and if you want to look at the details, there is the link to the message center is and worth checking out. We will be talking about town hall a fair bit, this update, but, uh, the biggest announcement is Microsoft are going to offer 1080p , up to four megabits bit rate for teams, premium users in town hall.

So this really bumps up that quality. We had a podcast a few months ago. Microsoft are investing a lot in events and webinar in town hall, really pushing up the value prop there and, and considering it's. In the box, albeit teams premium in this case compared to some of the

and jumping up to 10 80 p is definitely a, a big step forward. There's some, uh, some other new capabilities. Again, check out the, the messages into message if you want the detail. A little bit of Microsoft 365 Copilot news. We got the announcement of researcher having computer use, so if you follow the mainstream AI news, you will have already seen computer use in ChatGPT and Anthropic had an equivalent as well. Idea is you're in a chat experience. The AI can spin up a VM and do proactive things on that computer. So it's not your computer, it's kind of a dedicated vm, but it can search the web, engage in things, and if you need to log in to give an experience, it can pause, you can log in, and then it can carry on with the experience.

Uh.

It's interesting, but I haven't seen any massively positive response from the community in the other platforms that have this capability. It seems that in reality, because it's not your computer and the workflows can be a bit stilted, it can be challenging. Be interesting to see if anybody had any good uses with this in researcher.

Um, but I think kind of the idea of having something in your browser, driving your browser experience or in Windows driving your experience theoretically is more beneficial to the user. Obviously tons of implications around security and trust and and what it does and what it doesn't do. So this is constrained in the sense of you're giving control to a vm, but because it's constrained, you're also limiting the context of what the agent has access to.

And is it better for a AI to drive a computer, do the research, or just search the web? Really depends on your use case. But that is rolling out to Frontier firms now and it's going to be GA in November as well.

We talked earlier about MCP and Microsoft just dropped 17 new connectors for Microsoft Copilot. So these are connectors to allow Copilot to engage and interact with third party data. I won't list every single one out. You can grab the deck off the site as usual. Uh, but each one of these has the roadmap item and the data is due.

You've got options across content management, ops, project management, database collaboration. So these are all popular tools in their own right. And uh, depending on what kind of control and access these connectors give, it does allow users to start in Copilot and engage in their other line of business products, which is really lighting

onto rooms and devices. So first up, teams rooms on Android has had a ton of updates recently. , And we talked a couple of months ago on the podcast about kind of bringing teams rooms on Android up to parallel with windows. So cloud and tele frame, uh, is coming. Dynamic video tile resizing. So the, the layout on screen on the teams room resizing, depending on who's in the remote room.

Live captions front of room control for town hall and webinar. Uh, facilitator agents coming into scheduled meetings, so as well as ad hoc now in scheduled and joining town halls and webinars from teams rooms on Android. So lots of features there that are just kind of para para, lots of features there that are just lots of features across teams, rooms on Android that are just plugging some of the gaps, uh, versus the Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows,

again, talking of Town Hall, Microsoft have an enhanced production experience. So this is the idea of your inner Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows room, and you can use the room and the big screen as a canvas to do production. Of the town hall, essentially. So being able to control the layouts and the presenters and who's on screen and off screen.

I haven't had hands on on, on this yet, but really interesting idea to use that canvas and to make the most of that Microsoft Teams room. Uh,

For both teams. Rooms on Windows and teams rooms on Android. First one is simplified device settings for voice and face recognition. So this is enabling it or disabling it on a per room basis, either on the room or with remote configuration as well. So this is where some rooms might have this enabled.

Some rooms might have this disabled, depending on policy or the use cases. Support for multiple camera views and intel frame on teams rooms on windows, and there's the link for more details. People count in cloud InteliFrame coming into the pro management portal. So starting to see those numbers actually come through to the pro portal as well. And this is what I'm really interested in, recommended actions in the teams rooms Pro portal.

So imagine you've got hundreds, some customers have over a thousand rooms. This is surfacing recommended actions, and this feels like it's tying into the AI conversation in the sense of. Look at my entire estate, know what's going on, look at the logs, give me an action. This becomes a pain for simple actions for operations to take.

So really excited about that. Lastly, let's have a look at events. Obviously the big one is Microsoft Ignite. Really excited for that. Be out there, uh, I'll be doing a fireside chat with Kerry live from Ignite after the announcements as well. So as Fireside Chat goes, that will be full of interesting announcements and we welcome your questions.

Uh, I've got a couple of webinars coming up with Neat, talking about MDEP with Yoav on the MDEP team as well. That'll be really fun. And Logi after Ignite talking about kind of reactions and. Impact on the room space and the device portfolio space, and really great conversation there. And of course we have our regular Microsoft community change call.

We have MTDAMA and looking a bit further out to December, we have Ilya with all his kind of responses and thoughts around after the Ignite announcements. So give a bit of time for the dust to settle and you can bring all your questions around the Ignite announcements and what's going on generally in teams with Ilya on the first December.

Thanks again to Landis for all their support. Do be sure to catch them at Ignite and look out for their new partner program news. Hope that's been a useful update for you. If you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, do let me know. And if you're gonna be ignite, let me know. Be great. Say hello if you're there.

Thanks a lot.