Forum Discussion

M_SAN04's avatar
M_SAN04
Brass Contributor
Mar 17, 2020
Solved

VIEW ALL PARTICIPANTS IN VIDEO MEETING

We have 8 people on a daily video meeting in Teams.   Default setup gives 3 or 4 video screens and then rest only appear as small icons in the bottom corner. We need it so all 8 can be seen with th...
meetings
microsoft teams
  • StevenC365's avatar
    StevenC365
    Mar 30, 2020

    Right, lots in this thread to unpack.

     

    1. The 4 video view will work in the desktop app on Windows, Mac, Linux or the mobile app on Apple or Android. It is not possible in the browser. I don't believe this is likely to change in any useful time period.

    2. The 9 video view is in development, and Microsoft have heard loud and clear from MVPs that it's important. As far as I know it won't be here during April.

    3. The view you see will always be the students that talked most recently. If you keep your students muted and unmute to speak it shouldn't be confusing to work out who is speaking.

    4. As the teacher you can select any of the students in your meeting to view their video by clicking on the ... next to their name in the list of attendees and selecting pin, once you have finished unpin to get back to active speakers.

    4. Your school districts are probably wise to not permit the use of Zoom, they have a responsibility to not allow your student data to be accessed by third parties or several other risks. Look up zoom bombing if you think it'll be fine, or when zoom were sending data to Facebook without permission, or when hackers worked out how to access private meetings.

    5. Teams has very good controls to allow you to keep order during a meeting, controlling who can speak, present etc. It's harder to achieve this in Zoom. Tips in my video attached.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKdlyf_KDCg

     

Tugsim's avatar
Tugsim
Iron Contributor
Mar 30, 2020
Andre_LeBlanc wrote:
If/When Microsoft releases the update to the 9-box, is it clear that it still won't satisfy most of the people in this thread.  So why rush it?  If they do rush the 9-box or something larger like a video feed for every Participant, and it doesn't work that well or worse, breaks existing functionality, nobody wins in that scenario.

 Rushing it? Given that this thread's been going since 2016, and we had techs and devs suggesting that we'd be seeing content "very soon" almost a year ago, I don't think anyone's accusing MS of rushing anything. More that, after all this time, we were expecting to not be fobbed off with excuses, and were expecting some actual, tangible results.

 

Yes, Zoom and WebEx are established systems that handle the concurrent visibility of multiple users much better then Teams - but given how long apps like WebEx have been around, would it not have been possible, if not competitively advisable, for MS to mimic that functionality and enable Teams to be viewed as a viable video calling replacement for WebEx, rather than a poor man's fall-back? Or a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none?

 

You say you "doubt that many businesses or their respective IT departments are going to spend the time and money to roll out a completely new infrastructure to address what is hopefully a short-term annoyance as it relates to video conferencing"; I regret to inform you that, even with a team as small as my immediate unit of 10, let alone in departmental team meetings of over 120, Teams has fallen out of favour after 3 weeks of use. 3 weeks. And that's primarily due to this inability to see all users - not due to the current climate but because three of the team are based elsewhere, we WFH twice a week, staggered across various days etc. And that's common across the organisation. We have, potentially, in excess of 40,000 users likely to be needing to use video-conferencing facilities across every working week, and you're basically handing money to your competitors rather than working out a way of improving the functionality of your system and monetising it by (as they do) adding 'host accounts' as an upgrade to free accounts to include certain aspects of functionality. 

 

How / why is this so hard to understand? You're essentially saying "We're OK with average", rather than taking Teams and turning it into an *incredible* "master-of-all-trades"...