Copilot in Outlook: Meeting Preparation Is About to Get Smarter

Currently, the “Prepare for meetings with Copilot” feature requires at least three participants. Starting mid-October, this is changing. Copilot will soon support all meetings, including 1:1s. The rollout will begin in mid-October and is expected to complete by November 2025 according to the message center. With this update, you’ll also see new real-time insights in the Outlook meeting event form, summarizing relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources. Plus, you’ll be able to chat with Copilot to confirm action items or better understand meeting goals. The more context Copilot has, the better it works. Meeting series with related emails, shared documents, Teams chats, and previous Copilot transcriptions deliver the richest experience. If your organization limits Copilot to in-meeting use only and deletes content afterward, you’ll miss out on much of this value. Here is a relevant " how to " guide for users.

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.