As we welcome 2024, the air is filled with resolutions, aspirations, and goals for the new year. As individuals, we strive to better ourselves in the coming year. The Teams product team is also working to make your meetings better. We're excited to share how Teams is improving with updates that help you customize every meeting, deliver content seamlessly, and improve meeting efficiency with simplified processes.
Below, we'll take a closer look at how we're evolving meetings in Teams to deliver new, exciting, and flexible controls that will help you take your meetings to the next level in 2024.
Meeting comfortably and confidently with customizable meeting views
The conference stage or gallery is the heart of the virtual meeting experience and can hinder or improve meeting efficiency depending on your needs. We're excited to share how we're evolving the default gallery experience in Teams meetings to provide simpler, more predictable meeting states while giving you more control to personalize the view to your preferences.
First, let's take a look at the new default gallery experience that will be rolling out to everyone. The new gallery puts everyone on the same sized tile (16:9 ratio), regardless of whether their video is on or off. Additionally, the new default gallery layout is more consistent and predictable for all meetings, regardless of size and content being shared.
There are still some basic configurations that AI will optimize to improve engagement and efficiency. For virtual participants, we prioritize raisers and active speakers to increase visibility so no comments are missed.
When Teams Room joins a meeting, the room's video automatically zooms in to bridge the gap between remote and in-room participants. Remote attendees enjoy a clearer view, better connection, and can easily tell who is speaking. Want a custom view? In the Additional Options (…) menu, hover over the room name to resize the tiles to your preference. It's seamless, comprehensive, and lets you see everyone wherever they are.
Next, let's look at the controls that can help you customize the All Meetings view to fit your needs.
The default gallery size for a meeting is 16 participants, but you can customize the number of participants visible on screen. Depending on the size of your gallery, you can select the number of participants shown on screen: 4, 9, 16, or 49.
For some people, having their own video displayed on the screen is a distraction. You can now choose to hide your own tiles in gallery view. This will not hide the tiles from other participants, but will only hide your own gallery view.
If you want to reposition the video tile without completely hiding it, you can also choose to remove it from the main gallery and place it next to or above the main gallery.
For meetings with a mix of video on and video off, you can choose to prioritize video-on tiles in the main gallery to better connect with your team.
The new Gallery View update is in public preview starting this month. Learn more about gallery viewing on our support page.
In addition to meeting gallery updates, we're also introducing more customization options for the color scheme of the Teams interface. If you're tired of dark screens during Teams meetings and calls, you can now brighten your screen using the light theme option. Light themes allow you to customize the appearance of your Teams client. You can change the color theme of your Teams client from the default dark mode to a light theme in Teams settings. You can also join the meeting with a bright theme. Light theme is now available in the new Teams app.
Save time with simplified meeting participation
As our calendars become increasingly filled with virtual and hybrid meetings, the need for efficiency has never been more important. To address this issue, we're releasing a new update that improves the meeting joining process. These improvements make it quick and easy to join meetings, so you can engage in important discussions without delay.
Meeting invitations are the first thing participants see before they join, so let's start with invitations. To display the most important information and make all participation options clear, we're updating our invitation design to better display and visually organize group-related information.
Streamlined meeting invitations will be available in February.
As part of our improved invitation design, we're improving the meeting join link by making it shorter. Meetings are easier to share and join with shorter, clearer meeting URLs than ever before.
Shortened meeting links will be available in the second quarter of this year.
We're also simplifying the meeting joining experience across a variety of Microsoft accounts with the ability to seamlessly join Teams (free) meetings from Teams for work and vice versa. This allows Microsoft Teams (free) users with personal Microsoft accounts to join work Teams meetings directly from within the client and remain connected even after the meeting ends. Similarly, this feature allows Microsoft Teams (work or school) users to join Microsoft Teams (free) meetings directly from within the client. With this simplified experience, you will no longer be prompted to join through your browser and will be treated as a meeting guest (anonymous). This feature is scheduled to be available in February.
Improve efficiency with simplified audio and video controls
Increased efficiency extends beyond just participating in meetings. We're also streamlining in-meeting processes, including audio and video controls. This lets you focus on the conversations that matter rather than navigating settings to adjust audio and video. Starting this month, we're rolling out the Audio and Video in Meetings flyout, designed to help users more easily and efficiently manage their audio and video settings during Teams meetings.
Now, if you want to select a camera or microphone device, you can select the correct device directly from the flyout. You can also adjust volume, spatial audio, and noise suppression controls in the audio flyout.
If you didn't choose a background on the pre-enrollment page, you can easily change it directly from the camera flyout. We've also made avatars accessible from the camera flyout so you can use them in meetings, and your meeting reactions are reflected in the avatars. You can also adjust brightness and soft focus from the camera flyout.
Collaborate without compromise, wherever you are
In 2020, we launched Together Mode to make virtual meetings feel more personal by bringing everyone together on a shared background. Together mode offers a unique advantage by placing everyone in a consistent location in a shared virtual space, giving the group a common spatial awareness of where everyone is. These enhanced spatial awareness capabilities more closely mimic the cognitive processing that occurs when people are in the same room, helping to create more natural connections and reduce virtual meeting fatigue.
Together mode is now even better with a new layout for sharing content. Visually, this new layout moves Together mode video participants to the bottom of the screen, allowing you to see remote colleagues with a shared background in a horizontal plane, similar to a front-row experience in a team room.
This new layout gives those in the room a greater sense of connection with remote participants and extends the natural benefits of Together mode to the meeting point when sharing or presenting content. The new Together mode layout will be available in public preview in early February.