Teams Pop-Out Windows for Chats and Meetings

Popping Out Teams Windows

Updated May 10 with information about pop-out window support for meetings.

Office 365 notification MC207218 posted on March 21 confirmed the news shared in Microsoft’s What’s New in Microsoft Teams 3rd anniversary edition announcement that the Teams desktop client has its first pop-out window, but only on Windows (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 57292). According to a clarification posted by Microsoft on March 23, they will “provide support for Mac and Linux clients in the coming weeks.” The roll-out to Office 365 tenants begins in early April and should complete to all tenants worldwide by the end of May.

On May 9, Microsoft posted MC212453 to announce multi-window support for calls (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 57294). This feature will roll out in multiple phases (see section below).

Multi-Window Support

Since the introduction of Teams everything has been done inside a single multi-paned window and the only way to have multiple windows for Teams has been to create multiple browser tabs or windows. Now, the desktop client can pop-out window for personal (1×1) and group chats and (soon) meetings. Pop-outs aren’t supported for channel conversations. You can’t pop-out a personal chat in the Teams browser client.

Microsoft is keen to emphasize that multi-window support enables users to multitask more efficiently by dividing work across multiple windows and “more easily move between ongoing conversations.” In practice, the feature is particularly helpful when you need to keep an eye on a chat while working in another area in the client, such as viewing a document or composing a salient response to a topic in a channel. It’s also a popular request in Teams User Voice.

Popping a Teams Chat

You can pop-out a chat window several ways. First, find someone you want to chat with in your chat list and either double-click a chat or select the Pop-out chat option from the […] menu or the fly-out icon (Figure 1). The option is available for 1×1 chats with federated users in other Office 365 tenants and Skype consumer users.

Selecting a Teams personal chat to pop-out
Figure 1: Selecting a Teams personal chat to pop-out

Alternatively, the same fly-out icon is available in the top right-hand corner of a chat (Figure 2).

 Fly-out option for a Teams personal chat
Figure 2: Fly-out option for a Teams personal chat

You can also use the /pop command in the command bar to search for a user and pop-out a window to chat with them (Figure 3). This is probably how power users will use the feature.

Using the /pop command to create a pop-out chat with a Teams user
Figure 3: Using the /pop command to create a pop-out chat with a Teams user

In all cases, the window created for the pop-out chat. As you can see in Figure 4, you can take the same actions as are available in the chat pane in the desktop client.

Figure 4: Working in a pop-out Teams chat window

Multi-Window Meetings

Microsoft plans to deliver multi-window support for Teams meetings (Figure 5) in several phases starting in June 2020 (the timeline is subject to change).

  • June: Multi-window support for meetings is disabled in the Teams client and must be enabled by the user through the General section of Teams Settings.
  • July: Multi-window support for meetings is enabled by default. If they prefer to use the old experience, users can disable multi-window support through Teams settings.
  • August: Multi-window support for meetings becomes the norm for Teams and the control to enable or disable the option is removed from Teams settings.

Update September 5: According to an update (MC212453) published by Microsoft, October is the new target date for the complete switchover to the new meeting experience.

When multi-window meetings are enabled, Teams automatically creates a new window each time you join a meeting.

Multi-window Teams meeting (source: Microsoft)
Figure 5: Multi-window Teams meeting (source: Microsoft)

In addition, Microsoft is moving the meeting and call controls (mute, recording, hands up, chat, leave, etc.) to the top of the meeting window (Figure 6) to make better use of screen real estate. Microsoft says that the move also makes sure that controls don’t block underlying content. The new pop-out window supports newly announced features like background effects and 3 x 3 view.

Teams meeting commands at the top of the window
Figure 6: Teams meeting commands at the top of the window

Disabling the New Experience

If you don’t like the new pop-out windows, you can disable them in the General section of Teams settings (Figure 7). You’ll have to restart Teams afterwards to revert to the old behavior.

Control over window pop-outs is in Teams settings
Figure 7: Control over window pop-outs is in Teams settings

Although user interface changes like this don’t usually make it into the pages of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, we thought that this update was interesting enough to bring to your attention.

81 Replies to “Teams Pop-Out Windows for Chats and Meetings”

  1. Can I pop out a meeting? That would be way more useful so I can attend a meeting and keep chatting with everyone at the same time.

  2. Why can’t I see the pop out option? Is this due to my admin not releasing this feature yet?

    1. No. Admins don’t have the ability to prevent pop-outs because they are a fundamental part of the Teams client UI. However, like most Teams updates, new software must be applied to the client and to your tenant to make a feature work. You can update your client, but you can’t control the pace of the deployment to the tenant as that’s done by Microsoft. The process to get an update to every Office 365 tenant worldwide can take six to eight weeks, depending on what needs to change.

      1. You need to hover over the chat at the pop out option will take the place of where the time is currently.

    2. I think the check box “Register Teams as the chat app for office” needs to be checked. This is accessible in Profile -> Settings -> General

  3. Another user within my organization appears to have pop-out chat available. I do not. We’ve checked versions of Teams, and we are identical. Is there a setting I need to be looking for?

    1. How odd. They might connect to a different Teams endpoint. It’s hard to know because there are multiple touch points in the cloud. Can I suggest a reboot?

    2. I have the same issue, multiple people in our organisation have it but most don’t.

    3. Same issue. I have identical version of Teams as others, no updates pending in Windows Update… No pop out option. Can Microsoft at least tell us why? I understand its a “rollout”, but whats the rhyme or reason why some have it and others don’t?

      1. I’ll let the Microsoft people know that you (and many others) aren’t happy. But I bet they’ll repeat the statement in Office 365 Notification MC207218 saying that “We’ll begin roll-out to all customers starting in early April and expect to complete the roll-out by the end of May.” In other words, wait until the end of May (still 10 days away) before complaining…

      2. It is August and this has rolled out. My teammates all can enable this pop out functionality, but i am not able to. I can log into the same Teams client with a different O365 account and it works just fine. Why would one O365 account be able to have this meeting pop out functionality and another O365 account not have it work?

      3. It could be as simple as the server you’re connected to hasn’t been updated yet.

        Sign out and back into Teams and you might pick up the new feature.

      4. We’re having the exact same problem and it’s now March of 2022. Has anyone figured out how to fix this?

  4. how can I have a small chat-kontact list, like it was on Skype? It was much more easly acessable…

    1. Ask on Teams User Voice. This is an independent site – I can’t respond on behalf of Microsoft.

  5. I’m glad we finally have pop-out chat, but the implementation is rather atrocious. Whenever you get a chat notification and click on it, instead of just opening up the popped-out window (which should also flash), it instead opens up the full Teams app, removes you from your current context, and opens up the Chat panel. This is really annoying and completely screws up your workflow.

    Also–there’s no border around the popped-out window, so when you have the chat window open on top of Teams it’s visually pretty bad.

  6. Great update and good to see upcoming features, thank you.

    I got hands on using the pop out chat functionality and is great. I still think Microsoft could have made it a tad better, bringing it closer to how Skype functions as an IM – ie: a single pop out chat window not a window for every chat you want outside the Teams app.

    I also note that the pop out chat doesn`t work for Teams Meetings group chats which would have been useful for those instances where regular meetings are used as breakout rooms.

    Thank you again for this update.
    Cheers
    BT

  7. Pop out meetings will be useful for multi-tasking and/or supporting a chat during a meeting; however, it’s unclear that there’s the ability to pop out the video gallery as a separate component of a meeting. In Skype for Business, for example, you can pop out the video/participant gallery do, with multiple monitors, you can have all the meeting room participants visible/interacting when someone is presenting on the other monitor meeting content window. Is this coming as well? Is it on the roadmap?

  8. Any idea how we get pop out chats to float on top of other applications? Would be handy to keep the chat visible when working on documents, files etc. Currently it looks like I can scroll a web page or file in the background, but when I click into the window I lose the pop up behind it.

  9. Hi,

    Very useful ! Thank you for this article. It’s very handy to chat and work on a file in Teams at the same time.

    Regards,
    Florian

  10. I have a list of people I normally chat with. When they send a message, I used to click their name and the right panel would switch to that conversation. Now any and every time I click their name it opens the pop out window. Useless and annoying. How can I disable this “feature”?

      1. and that double click is the one i want to disable. with so many other ways to get the pop up , why apply it to double click? I swear i only single click. maybe single clicking too long and it records it as a double click. i really wish i could take away that keybinding.

  11. If I pop out a chat, then start a Meeting or open a shared doc, and I get a chat notification in the notification bar, and I select this it bring the chat up in the teams client not my pop up. So I have to switch from what I am looking at. Is there a way to select the notification but have the pop out chat window take the focus

  12. Is there anyway I can disable this feature? It drives me nuts, it just rolled out on our organisation and it really makes my personal UX really annoying. Pls tell me there’s a way to disable it

  13. This feature is terrible and we need a way to disable it locally on our machines Mac/PC. I am now constantly having popout open a new window, making me close it to have the single pane interface that I like.

    1. The good news is that an option is coming in the General section of Teams settings. Look for Turn on new meetings and calling experiences (requires restarting Teams) and uncheck it to revert to the prior behavior.

      1. I can’t find this option. I would really like to disable this feature.

      2. You can’t disable pop-out windows now. Microsoft removed that ability some months ago.

  14. I think the title may be a bit misleading. I have popout chats available, but I cannot currently popout a meeting.

    1. Nope. I can certainly popout meetings. The necessary code might not have reached your tenant yet.

  15. How can I disable this terrible thing? why it being forced on us?
    Please let me know if there’s a way, I searched all over settings, it is so annoying I’m thinking of uninstall the application

      1. I added a section in the post to tell you how to use Teams settings to disable pop-out windows.

  16. Will they be adding an option to have chats pop out automatically (minimized to task bar)? The pop-out chats are a step in the right direction, but the Skype chat workflow is what they should be aiming for.

    1. Feel free to make that suggestion on Teams User Voice. vhttps://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/

  17. Please add the option to pop out video gallery, where the speaker is full screen. This way, it will be possible to have two screens with presentation on the first and vide on the second.

  18. Have you seen an option for the new pop out meeting window to honour the theme you’ve chosen for the main Teams application? It seems to be white text on black background for everything, including comments, which is not a text colour combination my eyes like. I’ve had a hunt around for a setting but can’t find anything specifically for the meeting pop out theme, only the theme for Teams itself which is set correctly.

  19. I disabled pop out teams meeting, I thought it was a step backwards on a mac. I lost the multi frame view, Do not like that settings is on a seperate window when I want to chane which audio in and out I am using.

  20. Oh man, this change is kind of annoying. I can no longer find the options anywhere to control attendance options for the meeting, like who can present by default, or who can bypass the lobby.

  21. Is is possible to have an AUTOMATIC pop-out window whenever an incoming chat or a Teams call comes? I basically want to have the same experience as in Skype, someone opens a new chat with me, want to see a new window popping out AND flashing yellow (or some way to get my attention).
    The current notification badge is misleading when you collaborate with multiple large teams and when you’re part of many groups. That badge will ALWAYS show some notifications, even for groups you’re part of but you know that discussion is of no interest to you at this point.
    Having a separate window popping and turning yellow as Skype does, gets your attention that John wants to chat with me or that John replied to an existing chat.
    Similarly, if a non-important group chat turns yellow cause someone posted a comment, i can easily ignore it and go on, or maybe i open it later when i have some time, knowing it is not urgent.
    Wonder in what world these Microsoft programmers leave, cause in the real one we all need these features, Skype did it pretty well, and now they go back to a monolithic Teams with singular uncustomizable behavior.

  22. Thank you for showing me how to disable this. Ever since I made the MS Teams upgrade and acknowledged the switch to “the new experience” it has been a major productivity sink for both me and our engineering team. I can’t speak for Windows users, but our entire engineering team is on Macs, and we all unanimously don’t like the new experience.

    The problem is that on a Mac its impossible to track where all the popup windows are? So we have multiple chats and a teams call going, and can not seem to readily jump between the call we are on, chats in which we often copy/paste and share code, etc. All the popups end up behind other applications, are easy to get lost behind other windows, and then hard to figure out where they are and how to resurface them. And using the
    “Command+Tab” to show and open applications only shows a singleton instance of MS Teams, so I can’t use that shortcut to find the missing popup either.

    I just want a single app where I can see the chats and my call in. Don’t need multiple tabs going. Especially since the chat bar summarizes new notifications. As engineers, we already have a ton of applications running at the same time, so keeping all the communications among the team in a central app makes it easier to not miss communications.

    Please don’t get rid of the single window experience. It’s not a very usable for Mac users.

    1. This would be great feedback for Teams User Voice. As you might have noticed, this isn’t a Microsoft site so I can’t make any commitment on their behalf.

  23. Is there any way to control the size of the meeting popout? It continues to come up almost fullscreen, which on a 42″ monitor, is huge. I would like it to work like any other windows app…once i set it, it retains the new size

    1. I’ll ask. My experience is that the window keeps the size once you resize it… but I will ask.

      1. i can tell you currently it does not retain the size, which is why i am asking for the feature to be added. but i guess this isn’t the right forum for that 🙁

      2. I’ve asked the engineers… The difficulty here is that the devil is in the detail (so many different monitors of so many different sizes). We can but inquire politely, which is what I have done.

  24. Thanks, very good article Tony. Found it when I was trying to search how I could possibly pop out a Teams channel. Looks I can’t, based on your article. Did not find the request in user voice either (well checked only those with >1k votes). Strange, I’d thought this to be quite useful. Now I feel that I should create a group chat for the same gang which with I have Teams channel already, so that I could pop out the chat .. but then we would have both posts and chat and that is not good to have things going in two places. Of course I can create a separate browser tab for teams channel so it is kind of a pop out but that is not optimal either as every link click creates new browser tabs and the teams channel gets lost among the tabs .. Well maybe I create a Teams User Voice request for this

  25. My problem is I don’t want a new window for every meeting. I want to be able to choose which meetings I want in separate windows. But now with the way the setting is, if I want to block the automatic pop-outs I also lose all of the other new features like Gallery View or Together mode. Why is it all or nothing? Why can’t users choose if they want the auto pop-outs without disabling everything?

  26. Why would they take away the ability to disable popup meetings. What if I don’t want or like them. That’s a disaster. What happened to pro-choice?

    1. As usual with a large company like Microsoft or Facebook, their user experience team doesn’t bother to interact with actual users to see how people might want to use the products. They say hey here’s a feature let’s force it down everyone’s throat without bothering to find out if that’s what they want.

      1. In defense of the Teams developers, they do have a group of people who focus on user needs and a lot of what happens in the client is driven by the needs expressed through Teams User Voice. You could support an idea to give users the ability to disable pop out windows there: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/

  27. I’ve done that repeatedly. But as far as I can tell they don’t bother to read comments like mine that get lost in the shuffle of the hundreds of posts. Unless you get a lot of upvotes and replies it’s like spitting into the Pacific. So I just keep the new experience turned off and will as long as I am allowed to do so to avoid more than the single Teams window I require to function most efficiently. And if/when they eventually force me to have a new window for each and every meeting I will have to just close every teams window except the specific meeting i’m ignoring. every time.

    1. I don’t doubt that you have. All I can report is that I have seen how the Teams developers take user feedback into account when they prioritize work.

  28. hate this, so many windows. i dont need another pop out window for the video/voice chat….and before there is an option to untick the new expeience but now they have changed the list in the settings and you cant opt out! HATE it…why arent these developers always think they know best!!?!?!?

  29. 10 months after the roll out for this was supposed to be completed and I have a user who has these new features on their home laptop, but their office computer doesn’t. Both versions are up-to-date as of yesterday. We have tried multiple log outs, Windows updates, etc. but their office computer still does not have the ability to pop out calls/meetings in Teams. Incredibly frustrating that there’s no way for us to guarantee a uniform user experience.

  30. > Pop-outs aren’t supported for channel conversations

    This drives me nuts… I’ve supported this in Teams User Voice already but I wonder: how come? There must have been some rationale for not allowing channel conversations to be popped out. Does anybody have an idea of why this might be the case?

    It’s so hard to find the channel you were talking on 3 hours later… or even 10 minutes later. I end up writing post it notes with the name of a channel where I’m supposed to circle back with something… 🙁

  31. I always have the chat with my job-share colleague in pop-out. Sometimes, this chat turns to dark mode – which is great for helping me spot it. How do I turn on dark mode for this colleague/pop-out chat?

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