Attending endless Zoom meetings can drain your life. Sure, there are some fun backgrounds to look at from time to time, but it’s mostly a complicated set of screens alternating back and forth. But Microsoft Teams is preparing for a new look at your work at home experience.
Among the resources that arrive at Teams is a new way to maintain the focus of the participants, described in a post from Microsoft like “Live view”. The feature allows you to view meeting participants and presentation content side by side, while you can customize how that information appears on the screen.
With Live View, you get a customizable view of how you want content to be shared. You can pin the participants you want to follow on the screen, instead of having to search for them in a sidebar. You should also be able to see better when a new speaker started to attend, as well as when someone “raised their hand” during a meeting.
Compare that to watching presentations and screen shares on services like Zoom. Usually, you see the screen and nothing else, except the same line of faces at the top of the screen.
We first heard about Dynamic View in July 2020, when it was announced along with a series of other Microsoft Teams features designed to make video calls more visually interesting and productive. But now we have a target date for Live View – Microsoft Roadmap list as coming in March.
Additional Teams updates last year included live transcription, live reactions, speaker identification tools and an integrated task app that works together to make Teams the most flexible and easy to use option. These changes have done much to make teams feel more like the obvious choice for large-scale business meetings and classrooms than a sigh-inducing headache and everyone tolerates.