Microsoft Teams will make changes to the meeting gallery view in January

Microsoft Teams never seems to stop making improvements, adding in changes, or introducing new features. Today, Microsoft announced a bunch of new features related to the gallery view feature for online video meetings. These features will be available as a public preview later in January.

In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that the new default gallery view will put all meeting attendees in boxes of equal size in a 16:9 aspect ratio. This will be the setting even if a person's video is turned off. AI will be used to make sure people who raise their hands or speak during a meeting will have their viewpoints optimized.

While the default gallery view will have 16 people on screen, there will be options in place to change that down to four or nine people or all the way up to 49 folks on screen. People who don't want to see themselves on the screen will be able to hide their own box from their view of the meeting gallery, although everyone else in the meeting will still be able to see them.

There will also be a new option for people to move their own box in the gallery view to the side or on the top of the main gallery. In addition, users will have a way to place the tiles of people who don't have their video cameras activated at the top of the main gallery to focus on the people who do have their video cameras turned on.

Teams has also added a new Light Theme option that's available for all users right now. Microsoft stated:

Light Theme enables you to customize the appearance of your Teams client. You can change the color theme of your Teams client from the default Dark Mode to Light Theme from your Teams settings. You can join meetings with Light Theme too

Microsoft is also making changes to Teams invites "to better group related information as well as clean it up visually," which will be added sometime in February. The link to join meetings will also become shorter sometime in the second quarter of 2024.

People who use Microsoft Teams (free) with a personal Microsoft Account will soon be able to join Teams work meetings without having to leave the Teams client. That will go live sometime in February.