Upcoming Enhancements to Microsoft Teams Meeting Chat Controls

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There are many kinds of meetings, and Teams is a great tool to have virtual meetings in. As an example, it is possible to get to the chat of the meeting and start the discussion up front or continue the discussions or ask follow up questions after the meeting is over.  But sometimes, there are scenarios where organizer would want to keep the chat closed for comments outside of the meeting timeframe. And here is a new feature coming our way, to control exactly that behavior. The Teams admin center will soon allow setting up policies that will enhance your control over meeting chats. These new options are designed to give administrators more flexibility in managing how and when participants can interact via chat during meetings. These options will be available across all platforms, including Teams for Windows and Mac desktops, Teams on the web, and Teams for iOS/Android. This update is part of the Microsoft 365 Roadmap   If you are an admin, here is where you can find and contro...

Two new meeting features in Teams

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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.