Have you ever been in a Teams call sharing your screen when an embarrassing notification popped up from a private conversation? Well, you’re not alone, it is a widespread frustration. But, did you know there are several different ways to prevent this from happening?
Out of the box, Teams shows pop-up notifications during meetings and even while you are sharing your screen - that means anyone can get a glance at messages, reactions, and call alerts that pop up as notifications.
Hopefully, this guide will be helpful for all Microsoft Teams users; after we are done, there shouldn’t be any unwanted messages popping up that may be seen while sharing your screen in a call.
The first solution to the problem that you can try will work if you are running Teams on Windows. Focus Assist is a feature in Windows 10 and Windows 11 that helps you stay focused by blocking or limiting notifications, sounds, and alerts at certain times.
You can use Focus Assist to prevent notifications. To activate this, just click the notification icon in the bottom-right of your taskbar and click Focus Assist until it shows “Alarms only” or “Priority only”. Alternatively you can go to Settings > System > Focus Assist and set rules such as:
- Turn on automatically when duplicating your display
- During specific hours
- When using an app in full screen
To ensure Focus Assist can operate properly, go to Teams > Settings > Notifications > Notification style > choose Windows. This gives Focus Assist the control it needs to prevent Teams notifications from appearing.
Teams' built-in "Do Not Disturb" mode and managing exceptions
Another option is to activate Do Not Disturb directly within Teams. Unlike the system-wide Focus Assist, DND is Teams-specific, so it’ll only prevent pop-ups from Teams. For this reason, you’ll have to close other messaging apps or set them to DND, too.
It’s really easy to enable Do Not Disturb in Teams, you just tap your profile picture and then press the status option and select Do not disturb. This will suppress all toast notifications from Teams, but if you need very important notifications to come through, you can allow them to bypass DND. You can choose these priority contacts in Settings > Privacy > Manage priority access. The priority access feature is only available in the desktop and mobile apps.
Meeting-specific settings and presentation best practices
Next up is an option that users of the Teams PWA can use, if you go to Settings > Notifications > Meetings and Calls (Notifications and activity, in the web version) look for “Mute notifications during meetings and calls” (Web: “Show notifications during calls and meetings”). For desktop users, Microsoft says that this method is temporary and not always reliable for keeping notifications away so opting for Focus Assist or DND are better options.
The web version also has some other options that you may find useful, these are “Show message and content previews in notifications” and “Show notifications on the desktop when my Teams tab is not in view”. The first option is especially helpful if you’re waiting for a message from someone but don’t want everyone to see what the message is.
While all of these options are decent, there are a few digital hygiene practices to be aware of when you do share your screen. First, you can close the chat pane before you begin screen sharing, this will prevent preview messages from popping up. Secondly, when sharing your screen, choose the option to just share a single window, rather than the full screen, helping to limit what users see.
Microsoft’s implementation of preventing notifications during a call is definitely not the best. Hopefully, this guide has helped you work out the best way to prevent embarrassing notifications popping up during screen sharing.
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