Microsoft has finally listened to feedback from meeting
organizers who’ve wanted an easy way to disable the video of
all attendees in a meeting. In a new forum post, the company
confirmed that it will soon allow organizers to quickly prevent
attendee from turning on their camera when they’re meant to be
focused on the presentation.
“We are excited to announce we will soon be releasing the
ability to disable all attendee videos, and the ability to
disable a single attendee video,” Microsoft Teams engineer Alex
wrote in a forum post
spotted by us.
To be clear, there are two new features. One lets you
disable/enable a single attendee’s video and another lets you
disable/enable the video of all attendees. These new meeting
controls are particularly helpful when attendees turn on their
camera accidentally, which isn’t great especially when
someone’s video feed is distracting.
As per the roadmap, users will be able to disable the video
feed of people within Teams meetings by the end of this month.
Microsoft has also confirmed that this feature is coming to
Windows, macOS, and mobile platforms (iOS and Android).
New presentation experience on macOS and Windows
In June, Microsoft is also planning to
introduce a new presentation experience that will allow
users to quickly present their PowerPoint presentation without
manually uploading the PPT files.
Currently, users need to share their entire screen with the
audience, which includes the desktop, taskbar or dock. After
the next update, which is set to enable PowerPoint Live
integration, users can directly share their presentations
without needing to share their screen with the audience.
You can use PowerPoint Live by clicking on the “Present in
Teams” button in PowerPoint, which will send the file to the
active meeting.
Alternatively, users can open the Share content menu of Teams
and start sharing the PowerPoint files synced to the Microsoft
account.
As you can see in the above screenshot, Teams will have a
dedicated PowerPoint Live section.
In addition, Microsoft Teams will also allow presenters to
switch between different views and access their slides or notes
at the same time. The chat window would be visible on the right
side of the app to ensure that presenters don’t miss any urgent
prompts.
PowerPoint Live will be available to Microsoft Teams users with
an active paid subscription.
