Most teams use Microsoft Teams for chats, video calls, and the occasional file share. That’s functional, but it’s nowhere near the full picture. Over the past few years, Microsoft has added automation, AI tools, and collaboration features that most organisations haven’t discovered, let alone configured. If your team is using Teams only for the basics, you’re missing real productivity gains from a tool you’re already paying for.
Here are ten features worth switching on.
The ten features at a glance
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Tags & targeted mentions
Notify a specific group without alerting the whole team.
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Immersive Reader
A clean, adjustable reading view with read-aloud for any message.
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Slash commands
Type
/in the search bar to jump, call, or set status fast. -
Forward emails into channels
Each channel has an email address, forward context straight in.
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Breakout rooms
Split large meetings into small groups, then bring everyone back.
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Power Automate
No-code workflows for reminders, notifications and approvals.
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Live translation & captions
Real-time captions translated into each viewer’s language.
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Intelligent Recap
AI meeting summaries, action items and a speaker timeline (Premium).
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Speaker Coach
Private, real-time feedback on pace and filler words.
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Shared & private channels
Controlled collaboration with separate storage and permissions.
1. Tags and targeted mentions for focused notifications
Every message going to everyone is how Teams becomes noise. Tags solve that.
Instead of @mentioning the whole team for something that only affects three people, you create a tag, @DesignTeam, @ProjectLeads, @ClientServices, and assign relevant members to it. When you use the tag in a message, only those members get notified.
How to use it: Go to your Team, click the three dots (…) next to the team name, select Manage tags, and create a group. Add members, give it a name, and it’s immediately available to use in any channel message.
The immediate benefit is noise reduction. The longer-term benefit is that people stop tuning out Teams notifications, because the notifications are relevant.
2. Immersive Reader for accessibility and focus
Long message threads are hard to read, especially on a small screen or for team members with dyslexia or visual processing differences. Immersive Reader presents any Teams message in a clean, customisable format with adjustable font size, spacing, and background colour. It can also read the message aloud.
How to use it: Right-click any message and select Immersive Reader. You can adjust text size, spacing, syllable breaks, and enable read-aloud from there.
It’s one of those accessibility features that turns out to be useful for everyone, not just the people it was primarily designed for.
3. Slash commands for faster navigation
The search bar at the top of Teams is also a command bar. Type / to see a list of shortcuts: /call starts a call with someone, /files opens your recent documents, /goto jumps directly to a channel, /available sets your status.
How to use it: Click the Teams search bar and type /. The full list of available commands appears immediately.
This matters most for people who spend significant time in Teams. The navigation shortcuts become fast enough that you stop thinking about them.
4. Forwarding emails directly into channels
Important context often arrives by email and never makes it into Teams. Each channel has its own email address, anything forwarded to that address appears in the channel as a message, with attachments included.
How to use it: Click the three dots (…) next to the channel name, select Get email address, and copy it. Forward any relevant email to that address and it lands in the channel.
This is useful for any scenario where a key stakeholder communicates by email rather than Teams, a supplier, a client, or a senior leader who hasn’t fully moved to Teams. The team gets the context without anyone having to copy-paste or summarise.
5. Breakout rooms for workshops and large meetings
Putting twenty people in a single meeting room and asking everyone to contribute equally doesn’t work in person or online. Breakout rooms split a meeting into smaller groups who work separately and then return to the main session.
How to use it: During a meeting, click the Breakout rooms icon in the meeting toolbar. Choose the number of rooms, assign participants automatically or manually, and open the rooms. As the organiser, you can move between rooms to check in.
Breakout rooms work well for workshops, training sessions, retrospectives, or any meeting where small group discussion produces better outcomes than a full group format.
6. Power Automate integrations with Teams
Power Automate connects Teams to other Microsoft 365 apps and external services through automated workflows. When something happens (a trigger), something else happens automatically (an action), no coding required.
Common examples that save real time:
- File uploaded to SharePoint → notification posted to the relevant Teams channel
- Form submission received → approval request sent to a manager via Teams
- New Planner task created → reminder posted to the assigned person the day before the due date
How to use it: In Teams, click the Apps icon and search for Power Automate. Pre-built templates cover the most common scenarios. You can customise them or build from scratch.
The highest-value first automation is usually one your team does manually every day. Find one repetitive notification or approval step and automate that first.
7. Live translation and multilingual captions
Teams can display real-time captions during meetings, and translate them into the viewer’s preferred language. A presenter speaking English can have their words appear as Spanish captions for a team member in another country.
How to use it: During a meeting, click More (…) → Language and speech → Turn on live captions. Select your preferred language for display.
Translation quality is high for major languages. For international teams, this removes a meaningful barrier to participation.
8. Intelligent Recap with Teams Premium (AI meeting notes)
Intelligent Recap, available with Teams Premium, generates a summary after every recorded meeting: key discussion points, action items, and a timeline showing who spoke when. You can jump directly to any part of the recording without watching from the start.
How to use it: After a recorded meeting ends, open the meeting chat. The Recap tab appears once processing is complete, usually within a few minutes.
9. Speaker Coach (AI feedback for presenters)
Speaker Coach listens during meetings and provides private, real-time feedback on pacing, filler words (um, uh, you know), and whether you’re dominating the conversation. After the meeting, it generates a personal report with specific observations and suggestions.
How to use it: In a meeting, select More (…) → Meeting options and enable Speaker Coach (available with Teams Premium). The feedback is visible only to you.
For anyone who regularly leads client calls, pitches, or training sessions, this is a low-effort way to improve delivery over time without needing a separate coaching engagement.
10. Shared and private channels for controlled collaboration
Not every conversation needs the whole team. And some projects need external participants without opening up the entire Team environment.
Private channels are visible only to the members you choose within a Team. They get their own separate file storage (their own SharePoint site collection) with independent permissions.
Shared channels allow external participants, from other organisations, to collaborate within the channel without needing a guest account in your tenant.
How to use it: When creating a new channel, select the visibility type. For private, choose your members from within the Team. For shared, you can invite external users by their Microsoft 365 work account.
These options reduce the pressure to create new Teams for every collaboration need, keeping your Teams environment cleaner and governance simpler.
Microsoft Teams has become a full productivity platform, not just a meeting and chat tool. The features above are designed to reduce noise, eliminate manual work, and make meetings more productive, they’re already in your licence, waiting to be switched on.
Written by
Sahaj Arrora
Part of the Sereno IT team helping growing UK businesses make confident, jargon-free technology decisions. Read more microsoft 365 guidance in our Microsoft 365 library.
