Microsoft Teams might not have quite the same buzz on an international scale that Zoom has managed to generate over the last year, but plenty of people swear by it, and the platform's been getting better over time, too.

Now a host of new features are arriving for Teams to further upgrade its capabilities, most notably in the form of end-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls, to significantly beef up their security. That setting will be determined by an organisation's administrators, seemingly.

Equally interestingly, Microsoft has unveiled new hardware for Teams - Intelligent Speakers, which can sit in a conference room and listen in to transcribe whole meetings with up to 10 different speakers distinguished from each other. 

Microsoft Teams gets a slew of new features including encryption photo 2
Microsoft

There's no pricing or availability information as yet, but it's a promising idea that Microsoft has been working on for a couple of years, and should work just as well for remote meetings as well. 

The other big software upgrade for Teams comes in the form of expanded support for webinars, which can now handle up to 1,000 participants while retaining the ability to remain interactive and reactive, which is pretty impressive.

If attendance goes over 1,000 Teams will swap over to a presentation-only mode that can scale up to as many as 10,000 users. In fact, until the end of 2021 Microsoft is going to raise even that limit to 20,000 to account for the amount of working from home going on worldwide. 

Finally, and from an even more enterprise-focused point of view, Teams is also getting a new feature called Teams Connect, which will let it better act as a bridge between different organisations.