Microsoft Teams receives new features fairly regularly, enhancing the overall online communication and collaboration experience, supercharged by AI lately. The software received a boatload of capabilities last month, but it now appears that Microsoft is delaying a Teams feature which actually sounded quite useful on paper.
Back in May, Microsoft began previewing a revamped minimized experience for meetings, offering more controls for users who were multitasking. Basically, this new interface would allow users to raise hands and send reactions without restoring the full meeting window, in addition to the existing controls, such as mute and end call, that were already available to them.
There were two minimized experiences on offer. The expanded view also displayed the videos of up to four participants, as shown below:
The other, compact view, displayed no video content at all, just the thumbnails for the participants involved in the meeting and an indicator for the active speaker, as shown below:
However, in an update on MC1266027 in the Message Center, Microsoft has decided to stop further rollout of the feature without citing any reason. The wording "We will communicate via Message center when we are ready to proceed" does indicate that the company plans to resume rollout at some point, but no concrete date is known yet.
It"s unclear why the company halted the rollout of the new minimized views. Personally, I have been using them for a little over a month now and appreciate the increased flexibility they offered. Perhaps the reason for this stoppage was accidental clicks due to the small screen real estate or that there were other critical bugs that were hampering workflows and productivity. We will likely never know, but I do hope the UX returns soon.