Microsoft Teams gets better search and an encrypted lockbox

Microsoft has updated Teams with better search capabilities and a new lockbox that allows users to manage who has access to their material.

When users search for items, the roughly 270 million people who use Teams regularly should see a change in the results. The results are less cluttered and offer more context in summary, with the added benefits of filters to narrow down searches for files, content, and individuals across Microsoft’s services, including OneDrive and Word.

Making Teams more appealing

Microsoft’s bid to try and make Windows 11 more user-friendly is the driver behind this update. It’s also using Windows 11 Teams chat connectors to make the feature-rich Teams more appealing to customers.

Microsoft also announced a new customer “lockbox” for Teams this month, allowing customers to manage when others may access their material to do tasks.

For some years, Microsoft has had the lockbox idea for Office 365 subscribers, which allows consumers to ensure that even Microsoft support engineers cannot read the content of their interactions on Microsoft services.

Encryption support

According to a Microsoft support page, Customer Lockbox allows others to access data in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. According to the newly updated website, Microsoft appears to have introduced end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for these services.

In December, Microsoft made E2EE available to clients in one-on-one Teams conversations.

According to Microsoft, even they can’t access your stuff to perform service operations without your specific permission, thanks to Customer Lockbox. Customer Lockbox integrates you into Microsoft’s approval workflow process, ensuring that only approved requests have access to your files.

The content covered by the lockbox includes messages in email, voice conversations, Sharepoint, instant messages, and all messages in Teams, including group chats, private channels, person-to-person chats, videos, meeting chats, shared channels, SQL container data, and Teams activity feed.