Microsoft is constantly working to improve the meeting experience. And every upgrade – no matter how small – has a major impact at a time when so many of us rely on VCs as our primary collaboration medium. For a while, it seemed like Microsoft was lagging behind pureplay video conferencing providers like Zoom in terms of meeting functionality, particularly in ‘layout–ing’, presenter controls, and breakout rooms.
Zoom has had native support for breakout rooms for a while, letting you split a meeting into 50 or fewer threads. This allowed a free-flowing, brainstorming to follow more focused trains of thought, with each participant involved in a meeting of their choice and specific relevance. In contrast, Microsoft Teams followed a complex process if you wanted a breakout room-like capability.
To begin with, you’d need to pre–plan your breakout needs. Then you’d have to schedule individual meetings for each breakout session, repeating the process as many times as needed. This was unintuitive and possibly held back several users from switching from Zoom or a Microsoft Teams alternative.
We discussed how breakout rooms for Microsoft Teams used to work back in June of this year. Now, ahead of Microsoft Ignite 2020, we are delighted to announce that things are finally changing.
But before we get to this much-awaited enhancement for meeting hosts and presenters, let us quickly consider another useful control arriving soon: custom layouts.
Custom layouts revolutionise how meeting content appears on your screen. Whether it is an audio-only meeting with lots of screen sharing or a 10+ participant conference with several bobbing heads, layouts let you choose the perfect arrangement that would ensure focus, engagement, and zero clutter. For now, there are four layouts available for meeting presenters: gallery, large gallery, together mode, and focus mode.
Gallery is your garden variety grid, which is turned on by default. Large gallery enhances this by letting participants view up to 49 video streams at once. Here too, Zoom got there first – but Microsoft has quickly caught up with its own AI-powered layout–ing capability.
Together mode is an ingenious way of replacing the black grid with a naturalised setting, like a boardroom, an auditorium, or even a coffee shop. The focus mode is meant for distraction-free content sharing, turning off video feeds temporarily.
The new custom layouts are expected to equip presenters with even more control like superimposing the presenter’s video feed onto the content which works as a background. It uses Microsoft’s tried and tested Ai segmentation technology that’s already powering background blur and Together mode scenes, enabling a dynamic experience. Not a lot of details are available about the degree of custom controls as yet – watch this space as we bring you the latest updates.
Now, coming to breakout rooms, the feature has been in the works since July 2020.
Finally, the feature is scheduled for public preview starting October. Initial reports suggest that presenters can choose the number of breakout rooms (1 to 50) under the Rooms Settings menu, and manually or automatically assign a specific number of participants per room. Ignite 2020 could shed more light on this much-awaited feature, so stay tuned!
