Microsoft is kicking off 2026 with a packed wave of updates for Microsoft Teams aimed squarely at reducing friction in day‑to‑day collaboration, meetings, and calling. From smarter AI‑powered recaps and trust signals for external guests to deeper call queue insights and new certified devices, the February 2026 release touches almost every corner of the product. If you live in Teams for chat, meetings, or customer support, there’s something here you’ll feel quickly.
Microsoft details the full rollout in its latest post on the Microsoft Teams Blog, breaking changes down across chat and collaboration, meetings, Teams Phone, Rooms, security, and devices. Many of these capabilities layer on top of last year’s Copilot and sensitivity label work, but with a sharper focus: get you the right information faster, and make it easier to trust who you’re working with, regardless of where they join from.
Chat and collaboration: forwarding and finding the right files
On the chat side, the headline change is a deceptively simple one: you can now select and forward multiple messages at once in Teams. Users can choose up to five messages from a chat or channel and send them together in a single message, preserving both the context and order of the original conversation. For project managers and team leads, that makes it easier to share the “TL;DR” of a thread with stakeholders without copy‑pasting or screenshotting.
Microsoft Teams search is also getting more visual. A new grid view for files in Teams search results lets you flip from the traditional list view to a preview‑based grid, making it easier to tell apart files with similar names. From the Files tab, you can toggle from the list icon to the grid icon to see thumbnails, helping you spot the right deck or document without constantly opening and closing candidates and breaking your flow.
One of the more important collaboration changes is the rollout of Trust Indicators for external users. These are visual badges that sit next to external participants in chats and meeting chats, labeling them as external familiar, external unfamiliar, guest, email verified, or unverified, based on their relationship to your tenant and domain trust rules. Chats that include external users also get an “external” marker, giving everyone instant clarity about who’s in the room and what kind of relationship they have with your org.
Meetings: Copilot recaps, custom templates, and better layouts
For meetings, Microsoft is continuing its push to make Copilot in Teams feel consistent wherever you use it. The Copilot experience in Teams meetings is being unified with Copilot in chats, channels, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for licensed users. In practice, that means Copilot can now draw on chat history, meeting transcripts, and calendar context to produce smarter recaps, suggest follow‑ups, and help you rewrite messages in the same way across surfaces. This unified Copilot experience for meetings is now generally available.
The recap story goes deeper with customizable meeting recap templates. Instead of accepting a one‑size‑fits‑all note format, you can now design your own recap template using a free‑text prompt—describe the structure you want, paste in a format you already use, and Teams will shape AI‑generated notes to match. You can save custom templates for reuse, or pick from built‑in options like Speaker Summary (organized by participant) or Executive Summary (key takeaways at a glance). These templates are available across all languages that support AI summaries, with more detail in Microsoft’s support documentation.
Recaps are also getting more visual. AI meeting recap summaries now include visual references, capturing key on‑screen moments when someone shares their screen during a recorded meeting. Those snapshots are placed alongside the relevant parts of the summary, so you can quickly reconnect decisions to what was actually shown without scrubbing through an hour‑long recording.
On the layout side, a new resizable right and top gallery gives you more control over what you see when someone is presenting or spotlighted. You can now adjust the size of the gallery when content is on stage, letting you increase content or video size, show more participants, or swap how content and video share the screen to find the balance that works for your meeting.
Compliance‑minded admins get more control with custom banners for recording and transcription. IT teams can now configure custom in‑meeting notifications, either to inform participants that recording/transcription is on or to request explicit consent, depending on policy. The message can be localized across all Teams‑supported languages, so organizations can align the banner text with internal policy and local law.
Finally, a new Network Strength Indicator aims to make troubleshooting meeting quality less of a guessing game. When your connection gets shaky, Teams will display a notification in your self‑view and suggest steps like turning off video to stabilize the call; if another participant has issues, you’ll see a weak connection indicator next to their name. The goal is to reduce “is it me or you?” confusion and keep conversations on track even on imperfect networks.
Microsoft Teams Phone: deeper queue history, branding, and APIs
On the calling front, the Queues app is getting more capable. A new shared history of calls and voicemails gives service teams a unified view of all missed, incoming, outgoing calls, and voicemails within a call queue. This helps frontline and support teams coordinate follow‑ups, reduce duplicated effort, and avoid missed callbacks, especially when calls happen outside someone’s shift. Admins can choose whether all queue members or only designated users see this shared history.
Supervisors also gain more visibility with extended historical reporting in the Queues app. Teams now supports up to 45 days of historical data in queue reports—up from 30 days—allowing supervisors to analyze call trends, staffing patterns, and service levels over a longer period. By default, reports show 7 days, but you can expand the range up to a month and a half to better plan staffing and address peak times.
For organizations using Operator Connect, Microsoft is adding co‑branding to the Teams Phone experience. When users make or receive a 1:1 PSTN call using an Operator Connect partner’s number, the partner’s logo and name appear on the dial pad and in‑call screens across desktop, web, and mobile. This makes it clear which carrier is providing connectivity, while giving operators more visibility for their brand inside Teams. The feature is configured and administered by Operator Connect partners themselves.
Admins and automation engineers get a big win with Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams administration and phone enablement now generally available. New APIs for Teams user configuration, phone number management, and policy assignment allow organizations to automate common tasks like assigning voice policies to new hires, configuring call settings for frontline workers, and managing numbers at scale. By wiring these APIs into existing workflows, enterprises can standardize and speed up Teams Phone deployments across large, distributed environments.
Fundamentals, security, VDI, and new Teams devices
On the fundamentals side, Teams is adding automatic time zone synchronization with the device OS, without requiring a client restart. If you travel or change your system time zone, Teams will now pick up the change automatically, keeping meeting times and timestamps aligned; you can see your current time zone from Teams General settings.
Security and governance teams get a new Teams Admin Center capability to evaluate app trust using standardized compliance and security criteria. Admins can see trust signals and required documentation in one place, making it faster to decide whether third‑party apps meet organizational standards before enabling them in the tenant.
For virtual desktop environments, Microsoft has announced a new VDI solution for Teams optimization in Amazon WorkSpaces. Users of the WorkSpaces client for Windows get multimedia offloading, with audio, video, and screen sharing processed on the local device via the SlimCore media engine rather than in the cloud session. That means higher quality calls and meetings in personal or pooled WorkSpaces, though this particular optimization does not apply to Amazon AppStream.
Finally, the Certified for Teams devices catalog is expanding again. Highlights include:
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Lenovo ThinkSmart Tiny Kit – a compact, ready‑to‑deploy Teams Rooms solution designed to modernize meeting spaces with minimal clutter.
Lenovo ThinkSmart Tiny Kit -
Lenovo ThinkSmart One Pro (with ThinkSmart or IP Controller) – an all‑in‑one video conferencing bar with built‑in compute, AI audio, beamforming microphones, and autoframing for small rooms.
Lenovo ThinkSmart One Pro with ThinkSmart Controller 
Lenovo ThinkSmart One Pro with IP Controller -
Lenovo Wired VoIP Headset 5000 – a Teams‑certified, USB‑A/USB‑C headset with AI‑powered audio designed for modern professionals.
Lenovo Wired VoIP Headset 5000 -
Biamp Vidi 280 and Vidi Content Cam 250 – cameras tailored for large rooms and whiteboard content sharing, respectively.
Biamp Vidi 280 
Biamp Vidi Content Cam 250 -
Biamp Parlé VBC 2800 bar and VBC 2800 Teams Rooms system – all‑in‑one conferencing bars with AI‑driven audio and dual 4K cameras designed for medium to large rooms.
Biamp All-in-One Video Bar Parlé VBC 2800 
Biamp All-in-One Video Bar Parlé VBC 2800 Teams Rooms System
What’s New in Microsoft Teams February 2026 Update
February’s Teams updates are less about headline‑grabbing new apps and more about smoothing the edges of daily work: faster recaps tuned to your format, clearer signals about who you’re talking to, richer call insights for support teams, and a growing ecosystem of hardware that feels built for hybrid collaboration.
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