We’ve all been in Teams meetings and calls where people have lovely custom backgrounds, I’m sure many of us have even witnessed funny backgrounds. I am also sure our organisation has created corporate backgrounds and made them available for employees to download and apply these backgrounds. Well Microsoft are now making it easy for admins to deploy corporate backgrounds to users within your organisation! Organisation-wide backgrounds will be available to all in preview mode from April and will be complete…

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Spotlight is a really useful feature when in a Microsoft Teams meeting, it gives you the ability to switch the focus to a single person so their video becomes the main focus to the attendees in the meeting. This is something teachers have found incredibly useful when delivering live virtual lessons as it allows all eyes on the teacher. I’ve also seen this work brilliantly during meetings to give the main speaker a platform where the focus is on them….

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Microsoft are currently rolling out a feature update to Microsoft Teams on iOS and Android whereby users will have an option to reduce the bandwidth used while in video calls and meetings. You will be able to change this by going into the settings within the Teams app and select from the following Reduce data usage options. Never – default. Cellular – reduces the bandwidth when no Wifi connectivity is available. Always – reduces the bandwidth on both Wifi and…

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Recently I started experiencing problems receiving notifications within Teams. I spent some time fiddling with the settings and checking my Windows notifications to make sure nothing was being blocked. I couldn’t find a solution so reluctantly left things not working correctly. On the 26th February, Microsoft announced in the M365 message center that some users have been experiencing issues with notifications. In the message Microsoft stated they are currently working to repair the ‘All activity’ option for teams and channel…

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Teams meeting organisers will soon have a greater control of their meetings and be able to restrict who has access to a meeting invite. Currently a Teams meeting creates a web link to a meetings that could potentially be accessed by any person from across the globe. A major security problem for some. Meeting organisers will have the ability to enable a new lobby setting where only calendar meeting invited users will be able to join the meeting directly and…

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A lot of excitement was caused by the release of Channel Calendars. I for one was looking forward to this update. The potential of assigning a shared calendar to a team channel and having the ability to schedule meetings and events would have been a very welcomed update. Much to mine and others disappointment, the Channel Calendar didn’t live up to all it was supposed to be. The calendar did offer some nice new functionality to a team channel but…

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At Ignite 2021 Microsoft announced a new redesign and optimisation to the meeting experience with consuming shared content and the engagement of video and audio. Users will get a new visual experience within Microsoft Teams, known as Dynamic View. This will enable: Video and audio participants will be shown separately, with audio participants appearing as smaller circles. Shared content will appear larger, with more participants being visible alongside the content. Users can pin or spotlight particular people in the meeting…

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We have all gone to present a PowerPoint during a Teams meeting and wondered what is the best option to choose for presenting. Do we share our full screen, do we share a single application or do we share our PowerPoint file, all these options have their pro’s and con’s but all come with the similar issue of how can I see my presentation notes without showing the notes to all attendees? Microsoft will be adding a new way to…

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Microsoft will be adding the ability for any presenter to initiate a poll using Microsoft Forms while being in a Teams meeting. Before the meeting starts, the presenter will be able to create draft polls ready to launch in the meeting. During the meeting, the presenter can create and launch polls that any attendee can view and answer. All attendees will have the ability to see the results in real time and attendees can respond to the poll after the…

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Microsoft are launching a public preview program that will allow Microsoft Teams administrators to enable early access to unreleased features in Teams for users in their tenant. This means administrators will be able to give users access to new features within Microsoft Teams before they are on general release. This is great for internal teams who want to see what’s new before all users do across an organisation, or if like me, you would like to evaluate the features before…

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