Microsoft is working on a small but welcome upgrade for collaboration (opens in new tab) platform Teams that will improve the user experience during large-scale meetings.
According to a new entry to the product roadmap (opens in new tab), the Microsoft Teams (opens in new tab) gallery mode (which displays attendees on-screen in a three-by-three grid) will soon benefit from pagination.
“When you are in gallery view and there are more than nine videos, navigation controls will appear below the gallery. You can use these controls to view more video participants,” the entry explains.
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The new feature is still under development for now, but should roll out to all users in September.
Microsoft Teams update
Since earlier this year, Microsoft Teams (opens in new tab) has allowed up to 49 participants to appear on screen at any one time via a mode called large gallery view.
Although fun to play around with, the novelty of large gallery view quickly wears off, because the postage stamp-sized real estate afforded to each person makes legibility a problem without a large high-res monitor (opens in new tab).
With the new paging feature for regular gallery view, however, Microsoft has at long last provided users with a way to choose which other attendees appear on-screen, without compromising the viewing experience.
Admittedly, the nine-person gallery view is likely to be sufficient for most regular meetings, meaning pagination won’t come into effect all that often. But for department- and company-wide sessions or other large-scale meetings, the option to bounce through the pages of participants to check who is in attendance will likely prove useful.
In the future, we can imagine video conferencing (opens in new tab) companies moving towards a system whereby the grid can be rearranged with simple drag-and-drop mechanics. But for now, an upgrade for Teams gallery mode will have to suffice.
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