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A Small Window for Incoming Teams Calls is a Improvement
To be fair to the Teams development group, they work hard to make their product more usable. Some might say that they only do this because they’re fixing design sins of the past. I am more sanguine and think that the developers are reacting to user experience of using their product for day-to-day work. The result is seen in improvements like upgrades to the Files channel tab, text pasting, mic pending, noise suppression, and so on. The Teams developers aren’t afraid to dump ideas that turn out to be not so good in production either, like Together Mode.
Take Incoming Teams Calls in a Small Window
Which brings me to the change published in message center notification MC1045221 (last updated 15 June 2026, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 482747) concerning a setting that I bet many users know nothing about or haven’t discovered – the option to use a small window to view incoming Teams calls. The option is configured in the Calls section of the Teams settings app (Figure 1).
The idea is that directing incoming Teams calls to a small window is less disruptive than the traditional large window. There’s no need to switch between windows (for Teams and other apps) to keep an eye on what was going on before the call came in.
Deployment to targeted release tenants happened in May 2025 (that’s not a misprint; the original date for MC1045221 was 31 March 2025) and general availability completed for commercial tenants in late March 2026. Government tenants will have it by the end of June. In other words, the setting is probably available in your tenant. The update applies to Teams on Windows, Teams on Mac, Teams Online, and Teams Mobile.
Microsoft views Teams calling as an important part of the product, if only because once an organization is hooked on using Teams clients as the fulcrum for voice communication, it’s a simple transition to have the organization adopt Teams Phone, calling plans, Teams rooms, and all the other components of the Teams Phone system. Improvements to make calls as seamless as possible are therefore important to Microsoft.
Using the Small Window for Teams Incoming Calls
I found out about MC1045221 when reviewing unresolved message center notifications in Planner. Obviously, I hadn’t done a good job of reading the notifications or this post went by me without causing me to notice. In any case, I switched to the smaller window and think it’s a very good thing. The window is floating and resizable.
The big window has all the options you need to run a call, but I bet that most people don’t use most of those options. The options supported by the small window (mute, turn on/off camera, share content, and end call) are enough for most calls. And anyway, you can switch to the large window if you need to use an option that isn’t available in the small window. Oddly, I couldn’t find a way to switch back to the small window afterwards.
Speaking of which, I couldn’t take a screenshot of the small window in action. Some privacy setting that I haven’t tracked down stopped both the Windows snipping tool and Snagit from capturing a picture. I could show you a photo taken with my iPhone (always the weak point for any mechanism that blocks screen capture), but it wouldn’t add much value. It’s a small window.
A User-Controlled Option
MC1045221 says that the small window feature is enabled by default. That doesn’t mean that users automatically see a small window for incoming Teams calls. It means that the option to control what kind of window people wish to use is enabled in Teams settings, and it’s up to each user to select which type of window they wish to use. The default remains the large window. User-controlled options are always the best, don’t you think?
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