Microsoft Teams realizes the importance of recognizing the achievements of users, especially at a time when the entire world is suffering Corovonavirus COVID-19 woes. Since the outbreak, people are going through acute stress both physically and emotionally. In this challenging time, business companies are trying everything to keep their employees mentally charged.
Teams launches digital publicly verifiable badges
Microsoft is providing Teams users with more ways to recognize their achievements, courtesy digital publicly verifiable badges. In its recent blog post, Microsoft wrote:
“The ability to be recognized for our achievements is universal, whether they are big or small. If you’ve ever played a smartphone game or consider yourself a fitness enthusiast, you may have experienced the opportunity to earn badges that symbolize your achievements and growing skills.”
What are these badges all about?
The use of Microsoft Teams has increased in the wake of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, the company has come up with a new way to recognize and award open, publicly verifiable digital badges within the Teams interface. It’s called an Open Badges app template!
Similar to all other app templates, digital publicly verifiable badges are open-sourced Teams apps that can be deployed easily as your organization’s internal line-of-business apps.
Teams allows users to create and award badges to team members. Recipients and other team members will be notified about the awarded badge while award details can be viewed easily. Users only need to tag the badge recipient within the channel conversation.
If you are a Team owner, you can create new badges. Meanwhile, all team members can select badges from a complete list and award recognition to one another. This could very well be a good team-building practice.
The Open Badges app template currently supports more than 20,000 organizations around the world and is considered more than a digital sticker.
“In higher education, students may showcase these digital badges as verifiable credentials to their prospective employers.”
Given the surge in consumption, Microsoft Teams has decided to increase the number of participants you can view at a time during a meeting, to 9 participants.
The usage of Teams has touched 2.7 billion meeting minutes on a daily basis, resulting in a 200 percent increase from 900 million daily meeting minutes from March 2020.
