Hopefully you'll never have to use this Microsoft Teams update

Microsoft Teams on an iPhone
(Image credit: Shutterstock - Natee Meepian)

Highlighting emergency calls through Microsoft Teams should soon be a lot easier thanks to a new update coming to the service.

The video conferencing platform will soon allow admins to create customizable banners within Microsoft Teams that will alert users when an emergency call is coming through.

This should help such calls stand out immediately to users, particularly if their attention is divided between a number of other tasks.

Microsoft Teams emergency

In its official entry on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the company notes that users will be able to acknowledge their admin's message by clicking on the banner within a Microsoft Teams call.

This will allow admins to phrase or word the alerts however they need to, which could be extremely handy for schools or industrial customers, who might have entirely different emergency categorizations.

The feature is still in development for now, but Microsoft has set an expected release date of April 2022, meaning it could arrive soon.

Upon launch, the feature will be available for Microsoft Teams users across the world on desktop and Mac platforms.

The news is one of a long series of improvements and upgrades made to Microsoft Teams in recent months as the company looks to ensure hybrid and remote workers are still able to get the most out of its collaboration tool.

Perhaps most usefully, Microsoft recently revealed that Teams users will soon be able to mute notifications whilst they are in a video conferencing meeting or don't want to be disturbed.

On a similar note, another upgrade concerns the addition of chat bubbles so that users wouldn't miss private messages sent during a video call, both 1:1 or as part of a group call.

Recent figures from the company suggest that Microsoft Teams now boasts over 270 million monthly active users (MAUs), as the hybrid working age continues to drive the platform from strength to strength.

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.