Custom Background Images Available for Teams iOS and Android Clients

Choosing a background image on the Teams iOS client

Users of the Teams mobile clients can now choose background images for their meetings, including custom backgrounds from their device’s camera roll. The implementation works well as long as the image you want is in your camera roll. Not being able to browse other repositories is a small gripe about a feature that many users will welcome.

Microsoft to Push Ads for Teams Personal to Corporate Users

Microsoft plans to push ads for Teams for personal life into the activity feed of Teams mobile clients used by enterprise accounts. It’s a daft idea. Unsolicited communication is never welcome. This is a bad example of a company abusing its position to advance its own interests without asking whether their paying customers want this kind of communication.

New Teams Reduced Data Usage Mode for Mobile Clients

The Teams mobile clients (iOS and Android) benefit from a reduced data usage mode during video calls. The new mode can cut the amount of cellular data consumed significantly. We ran a simple test of a ten-minute meeting involving a shared PowerPoint slideshow and saw data usage reduce by 71%. That’s not a bad outcome!

Teams Quiet Hours Settings Valuable for Mobile Devices

Tired of receiving Teams notifications when you’re watching TV in the evenings? Turn on Quiet Hours to suppress notifications when you prefer not to be disturbed. And you can even turn off notifications for complete days too. All of this is only available for the Teams mobile client because it’s the only that people are most likely to be using when they should be thinking about their work-life balance.

Teams Voice Memos – Interesting Functionality with a Compliance Problem

The Teams mobile clients allow users to record and send voice memos in personal and group chats. It’s nice functionality, but from a compliance standpoint some glaring weaknesses exist in the way that Office 365 captures compliance records for these memos. No voice recognition, no metadata, nothing to search for. It’s a compliance mess that Microsoft needs to clean up.