Microsoft launches new video meetings feature for Teams

It was widely reported by Microsoft back in April of this year that its collaboration platform Microsoft Teams had over 145 million daily active users. This is in comparison to the 75 million daily active users it had before the pandemic. Over the course of pandemic, Microsoft Teams has been transformed from a Slack-like chat platform into a full video-meetings service. 

Microsoft has taken this one step further by recently revealing that will bringing a new paging feature for Teams which will allow users to view twice the number of people in live videos on screen. 

This will mean that Teams users will now be able to view a huge 98 people on just one video meeting which is over double the current Zoom matching total of just 49 people. 

Having 98 people on one video call at the same time may sound a bit excessive, however Microsoft has enabled this to work efficiently through the new “paging” feature for the Large Gallery mode. 

Therefore, when users are in Large Gallery mode – if there are more than 49 people on screen – you will find that navigation controls will appear below the Large Gallery, which can then be used to either view or engage with more participants. 

The decision made by Microsoft to split the 49-people view into two pages does make logical sense, given that it can be quite overwhelming to having 49 people on a screen at one time – and doubling this figure for one screen will make it difficult to see those people. 

Microsoft were a little slow to create the 49-person video view at the start of the pandemic, with many users particularly schools with Office 365 looking to use Zoom instead as it could support 49 people from the start. 

The paging feature comes as a result of Microsoft shifting towards hybrid working arrangements for its 160,000 staff worldwide. This means that Microsoft will be looking to improve this area further well into the future. 

This new feature is now available on public preview with it soon to be generally available for users. 

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking to adopt remote working on a more permanent basis and is looking to implement Microsoft Teams in order to take advantage of the above new feature then contact one of our IT experts today to discuss your specific requirements. 

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