Join Teams work meetings from Microsoft Teams (free) and vice versa

Microsoft Teams (Free) users can currently join Teams for work (or school) meetings only as guests, which requires them to use a browser and results in a sub-optimal experience. The new feature rolling out will allow these users to join Teams for work (or school) meetings in one click, without being redirected to the browser or asked to fill in their name/surname. They will also be able to continue collaborating with the meeting organizer and other participants via meeting chat after the meeting.  The feature will work in the opposite way as well, so Teams for work (or school) will just as easily be able to join meetings hosted by a Teams Free user with one click. This is associated with Roadmap ID: 167326

Two new meeting features in Teams

Teams backrounds is nothing new, but a common request has been the cpapbility of animated backgrounds in meetings and regular calls.

Moving backgrounds should be deployed to most organizations by now (*1). The backgrounds can be found in the "Effects and avatars" section together with frames.

This feature will not be available on "low-end" devices. It requires at least 8GB Ram and a CPU with at least 4 logical processors. 

At the moment, there is no way to upload or use your own animations as Teams only supports pre-defined backgrounds from Microsoft.


One common challenge with content sharing is the viewer's screen size compared to the screensize of the sharer's. To help users, Teams has now introduced zooming capability in a meeting.

Simply move the mouse over a screen-sharing session, and use the "+/-" symbols in the bottom left corner.

This feature should also already be rolled out to most organizations by the time this is posted (*1).


(*1) - Some features are being released to the classic version of Teams, some to both clients, and other features are being released only to the new Teams version. But at one point in time, the old client will be phased out.


Comments