Customizable avatars, a “premium” offering and more integrations with Dynamics 365 are among the biggest updates to Microsoft’s Teams collaboration application announced at Ignite 2022.

Teams has been a major business opportunity for the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant and its partners, with more than 270 million monthly active users.

Ignite 2022 runs from Wednesday to Friday online with a limited in-person presence in Seattle, according to Microsoft.

[RELATED: The Biggest Microsoft Teams And M365 Announcements At Build 2022]

What Teams News Came Out Of Microsoft Ignite 2022?

Marc Menzies, president and chief technology officer at Ronkonkoma, N.Y.-based Microsoft partner Overview Technology Solutions, told CRN in an interview that his company partners with others to deliver Teams-enabled telephony and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), which has been in demand from customers.

Menzies said he hopes to see Microsoft continue to invest in text messaging native to the platform, which is also in demand.

“There are clients and partners willing to pay for it,” he said.

In July, on the company’s latest quarterly earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said that over the past year, Microsoft has “introduced more than 450 capabilities to empower frontline and knowledge workers to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously as well as remote and in person.”

“Teams is taking share across every category—from collaboration to chat to meetings to calling—and seeing higher usage intensity as companies turn to the platform to accelerate their digital transformation and orchestrate all their business processes in the flow of work,” Nadella said on an earnings call in July.

“ISVs from Adobe to Workday have built deep integrations with Teams,” he continued. “And more than 100,000 companies—including Johnson & Johnson, Lumen Technologies and Progressive Insurance—have deployed custom line-of-business [LOB] applications in Teams.”

Using Teams as a phone system and devices to make a Teams-enabled conference room are also on the rise.

“Teams Phone is the market leader in cloud calling across VoIP and PSTN,” Nadella said. “We now have over 12 million PSTN users, nearly double the number a year ago. And Teams Rooms bridges the gap between people working remotely and those in the office with innovations like AI-powered cameras. More than 60 percent of the Fortune 500 have chosen Teams Rooms to connect employees across the hybrid workplace.”

Here are the biggest announcements to come out of the conference.