Long time users of Microsoft Teams know that they can minimize the online meeting window so they can still keep track of the meeting itself while doing other things like viewing a presentation. Today, Microsoft is introducing a new option that offers an expanded meeting gallery as an option for the minimized meeting window.
In a post on the Microsoft 365 blog, the company says that members of the Teams Public Preview or Microsoft 365 Targeted release can check out the new minimized meeting window for the Windows and Mac versions of Teams. It states:
The existing single-tile meeting view for attendees, which shows the active speaker, has been enhanced with the option to expand to a gallery view which shows up to 4 meeting participants and a Me Video tile.
If you still want to see just the active speaker in the minimized meeting window, the good news is that this is the default view for this view. However, if you want to expand it to the new four-person grid, you can head over to the app"s Show participant gallery option and then activate the expanded gallery view. That"s the square icon with the line in the middle.
However, when presenting in a meeting, the default view for the meeting window will switch to the new extended gallery view. You can change this by clicking on the Show only active presenter option. If you are using Teams to share a screen during the meeting, the expanded gallery view will pop up by default. That will show up to four meeting members, the screen-shared content, and the person who is handling the presentation.
While Microsoft is testing this feature now with the Teams public preview members, there"s no word yet from the company on when the new minimized meeting window options will become generally available for all Teams users.