Microsoft Teams is facing some serious competition from Zoom and Zoom offering a Gallery View that displayed as many as 49 participants, the 2×2 offering from Teams simply wasn’t sufficient.
Today Microsoft are rolling out an improvement to Teams that offers a 3×3 layout, delivering the full brady bunch experience. While the new 9x view doesn’t match the 49 from Zoom, in reality it services most meetings which are regularly below that number.
It is worth clarifying that the limit of people in a Team meeting is actually 250, you’ll just seen the most recent active speakers in the video wall. With Teams Live Events, organisations can have a massive 10,000 attendees.
For anyone who’s used video conferencing, you know that talking over other participants is a real issue so having massive meetings with the intent of actually being productive, having serious discussion and making decisions is not practical.
What Zoom offers is much more of a passive experience where there’s a 1-3 hosts and the rest are participants, with an exercise class being a great example.
In terms of getting the new 3×3 view in Teams, there’s nothing you need to do as an attendee, or a Teams admin, it will simply be rolled out to your Office 365 instance over time. Microsoft have indicated this may take as long as the end of May before all instances are complete, so hold tight, it is coming.
This feature was in response to competition certainly, but also user feedback. We’ve now seen a number of product features be implemented as a result of voting on the feedback platform Uservoice.
In addition to the new 3×3 Video display feature, Teams recently added background blurring as well as virtual backgrounds and Teams has more features coming soon, including:
- Ability for Meeting organisers to download participant lists (People Pane top right corner).
- Updated Meeting Options – Let attendees who dial in on audio conference bridge bypass the meeting lobby
By late May it is anticipated regular scheduled Teams meetings participant numbers will be increased from 250 to 350 users.
