Teams Rooms on Windows device management consolidation in the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal
To meet customers’ needs for a one-stop destination to configure, monitor, and manage Teams rooms devices, we will be transitioning all Teams Rooms on Windows devices, irrespective of their licenses, to the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal on May 1, 2025. This change delivers a unified device management and admin portal experience. Teams Rooms on Windows devices will no longer be available in Teams admin center (TAC) after June 1, 2025. As of May 1, 2025, all Teams Rooms on Windows devices with Standard or Basic licenses will be visible in the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. Customers who have Teams Rooms Basic or Standard-licensed rooms and are currently using the TAC will now have device management functionalities within the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal and will retain access to a subset of features equivalent to those in the TAC. To take advantage of the full suite of device management and space analytics in the portal, a Teams Rooms Pro license is required. For organizations who have never used the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal, those with Teams or Teams Device administrator roles will be able to access the Pro Management portal by that date via https://portal.rooms.microsoft.com if URLs have been allowlisted per instructions at https://learn.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/rooms/enroll-a-device. Please see these resources for more information: See Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 482539 Review MC1041960 post in the Microsoft 365 admin center for more details Learn more about Teams Rooms Pro Management in this video Find product documentation here: Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro management Frequently asked questions Q: Which Teams Rooms on Windows customers will be impacted? A: This change impacts all Teams Rooms on Windows customers with commercial, GCC, and GCC-H tenants. Those licensed with Standard and Basic will have the greatest impact. For those that have used only Teams admin center and are unfamiliar with the capabilities of Teams Rooms Pro Management, we encourage you to view the short videos on Teams Rooms Pro Management - YouTube and product documentation on Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro management - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn. Q: I’ve never accessed the Pro Management Portal before; do I need to add any license to access it because of this change? A: There is no need to purchase any additional license to access the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal. After May 1, 2025, the Pro Management portal can be accessed at https://portal.rooms.microsoft.com after whitelisting the URLs provided at aka.ms/PMPenroll. Customers who want the full multi-OS, multi-brand device health monitoring, management, and space analytics capabilities of Teams Rooms Pro Management, should license rooms for Teams Rooms Pro. Q: Will Teams Rooms on Android devices transition from the Teams admin center to the Pro Management portal as well? A: Our goal is to provide a one-stop admin portal for all Teams Rooms, whether they are on Windows or Android. Because capabilities can vary due to the operating system of the device, we are first focusing on transitioning device management on Windows-based devices. Q: With the transition to manage Teams Rooms on Windows devices in the Pro Management portal, do we still manage Teams panels in the Teams admin center (TAC)? A: Yes, for now, you will still need to use the Teams admin center to manage Teams panels. Q: Teams Rooms Pro Management has been included in the cost of a Teams Rooms Pro license. Are you now providing that for free to customers who have only Basic or Standard rooms? A: No. Basic and Standard Teams Rooms licensed customers have access to a sub-set of features that equate to what they had in the Teams admin center. They will not have all the device and updates management, or space analytics features that come with a Teams Rooms Pro license. Q: Can an organization's IT team override the change and keep using the Teams admin center? A: No. This is a mandatory transition as the Teams admin center (TAC) agent running on the Teams Rooms on Windows device will be decommissioned.
New frontline worker pilot deployment experience now available in Teams admin center
Get your frontline workers started on Microsoft Teams. In as little as two minutes, deploy a pilot for your frontline workers! Our new pilot deployment experience, available in public preview, is your playground to test all the capabilities Teams has to offer, validate which features are most valuable to your frontline workers, and set yourself up for a successful org-wide rollout.Voice isolation in Microsoft Teams enables personalized noise suppression for calls and meetings
Remote meetings have changed the way we collaborate, offering valuable flexibility in how and where we work. In any meeting, you are likely to see colleagues participating from a variety of environments, including offices with open floor plans, busy coffee shops, or even waiting for a flight. This flexibility frequently comes with uncontrollable distractions from nearby sounds and voices that can disrupt the focus and productivity of our meetings and calls.
New enhancements in Private Channels in Microsoft Teams unlock their full potential
Private channels have long empowered focused collaboration among a subset of a team’s members. Whether you're managing sensitive projects, driving confidential initiatives, or simply need a space for more targeted discussions, private channels offer the control and privacy your team needs. Now, private channels are evolving to meet the needs of modern teams. In response to customer feedback, we are introducing enhanced flexibility, greater scalability, and streamlined compliance management. Read on to learn about these key enhancements and how to prepare. Why Private Channels Matter Private channels offer a dedicated space for conversations that benefit from added structure, persistence, and control. They’re especially valuable when navigating sensitive topics like budgets, HR discussions, managing project-specific workstreams, or collaborating with clients and vendors who require limited access .While chat are ideal for quick exchanges, private channels help keep discussions organized, make shared files easier to find, and help ensure conversations remain accessible over time, all while giving you more control over who can access. What’s Changing—and Why It Matters To support growing usage and help simplify compliance, private channels will now use a group mailbox (like shared channels) instead of storing messages in individual user mailboxes. This change unlocks several key benefits: 🚀 Expanded Limits Feature Current New Max private channels per team 30 1000 Max members per private channel 250 5000 Meeting scheduling ❌ ✅ Supported Simplified Compliance At a user level Group Helping to Simplify Compliance By aligning private channels with group-based storage, compliance policies (e.g., retention, legal hold, DLP, eDiscovery) can be applied at the team (Microsoft 365 group) level, helping to reduce complexity and driving consistency across channel types. For example, one retention policy can be applied to the team’s group, instead of managing a separate policy for private channels. Organizations with compliance policies (retention, legal hold, DLP, eDiscovery, Optical Character recognition) for private channels must ensure those policies are also applied to the team’s group scope before migration begins. Existing policies for user mailboxes will continue to apply; post-migration, new private channel data will be governed by policies of the group mailbox. What Compliance Admins Need to Do To enable a smooth transition and help maintain compliance coverage, follow the below: Microsoft Purview Hold and eDiscovery Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, update hold policies to include the team’s Microsoft 365 group mailbox in addition to user mailboxes. After Migration: New data will reside in the group mailbox. For full eDiscovery, search both user and group mailboxes. Note: Private channel message history (edits/deletes) in user mailboxes under an existing hold will remain in their preserved user library folder until the hold expires. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, update DLP policies to include team’s group. After Migration: Check that the DLP policies are scoped to the group mailbox for private channels. Microsoft Purview Retention Policies Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, go to solutions -> Data Lifecycle Management -> Retention policies Create Teams channel messages policy scoped to Teams having equivalent Retention type and duration similar to existing private channel retention policies. After Migration: Set retention policies for the parent team with all channels in the team in mind, including private channels. Microsoft policies for Optical Character Recognition Optical character recognition (OCR) is managed via Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy. Before migration, modify the corresponding DLP policy that needs be applied for OCR to private channels and change locations to all users and groups. What’s Next This update helps make private channels more scalable, manageable, and compliant. It’s a big step forward for organizations that rely on Teams for secure, structured collaboration. Migration is scheduled to begin in early October 2025 and is expected to be completed by the end of December 2025 for the worldwide cloud. During this period, private channel data will gradually move from user mailboxes to the team’s group mailbox. Private channels can be used throughout the migration. Special cloud migration will happen in early 2026. Migration can start or end at different times for each tenant during the rollout period. To track progress, a new PowerShell command will be available for tenants to check whether their migration has started or is completed. The command will be - Get-TenantPrivateChannelMigrationStatus -TenantId <tenantId> We’ll be updating public documentation soon and will share links here.Microsoft Teams Town Hall: Host Professional Digital and Hybrid Events at Scale
Over the past year, Microsoft Teams town hall has made significant strides, continuing to evolve as a platform for scalable digital and hybrid events. It now provides enhanced production controls and richer attendee experiences. Whether you’re hosting a company-wide all hands, a hybrid town hall from your headquarters, or a large presentation for clients, Teams town hall provides a unified, professional solution that keeps everyone engaged and connected, supporting up to 100,000 simultaneous attendees. If you are new to town hall or are considering consolidating your communication on Teams to host scalable events, we’d like to share the latest progress and key features that make town hall a great choice for large-scale events with enhanced customer experiences. Scalable event experience in Teams Rooms - Hybrid events made easy Modern events often combine an in-person audience with remote participants. Teams town hall now fully supports these co-located experiences through seamless integration with Teams Rooms systems. When using Teams Rooms on Windows, a conference room system assigned as a presenter can join the event in presenter mode, with the front-of-room display defaulting to the attendee view. From the console, presenters maintain complete control over what appears on screen, including access to the green room and off-stage management. They can also switch the front-of-room display to presenter view without affecting what remote attendees see. The result is a smoother, more coordinated hybrid experience—transforming the on-site AV setup into a powerful production studio. In addition to this new capability for Teams Rooms on Windows, town hall is now supported for Teams Rooms on Android. These systems can now join a town hall as an attendee, allowing a group to participate together in-person with a Teams Room on Android device. Ultra-low latency (ULL) streaming – Real-time engagement Historically, large broadcast-style events had a significant delay of around 20–30 seconds for attendees. Town hall now reduces that delay with ultra-low latency (ULL) streaming for Teams Premium users. When enabled, ULL streaming dramatically reduces the delay for attendees watching the live stream to less than five seconds. This means your audience hears and sees the presenters in near real-time allowing more natural engagement. . This low-latency stream is auto-activated for town halls organized with a Teams Premium license, and it works with Microsoft’s eCDN solutions to scale securely for up to 20,000 concurrent event attendees. 1080p full HD video quality – Crisp, professional broadcasts Visual clarity is key to professional, high-quality event production. Town hall now supports 1080p full HD video for live event streams, a significant improvement from the former 720p limit. With 1080p, your town hall comes through with sharper, more detailed video meaning faces, text, and visuals are crystal clear for every attendee. This professional, studio-quality look helps land your message with a more engaging experience that holds audience attention. This feature enables 1080p resolution for up to 20,000 concurrent event attendees. This feature is currently in private preview, but will soon be generally available, and requires a Teams Premium license to enable. Event layouts & “Manage What Attendees See” – Polished production control Town hall gives organizers and presenters with Teams Premium powerful event layout control to craft a dynamic viewing experience for event attendees. Using the “Manage What Attendees See” feature, you can act as a producer in real-time, deciding who and what appears on the screen at any time. For example, you might start with a full-slide view during a critical data presentation, then switch to a side-by-side layout showing the presenter’s video alongside the slides for commentary. Town hall allows up to seven presenters to be shown simultaneously alongside shared content, an improvement over previous limits, so a whole panel can appear with the presentation media at once. Attendees stay focused on the content you want to highlight, and you can seamlessly transition between layouts (slides, speaker gallery, demos, etc.) to keep the presentation engaging and ensure that presenters land their key messages with the right information for attendees. Screen sharing navigation – No need to say ‘next slide’ During large events it’s common for multiple presenters to speak to the same presentation. Now presenters can share control of their slides with up to 20 other presenters at the same time, removing the need to hand off control between sections and providing seamless navigation of the slides throughout the presentation. Control is delegated by the user sharing their screen and can be adjusted at any point of your event. Live polls – Real-time audience engagement Keeping large audiences engaged can be challenging, but town hall now includes integrated polls to allow participants to stay involved. Organizers with Teams Premium can create and launch polls during the event, and results can be shared instantly with everyone. This capability transforms a one-way broadcast into a two-way conversation. For attendees, polls provide a quick and easy way to participate and contribute. For presenters, polls offer immediate feedback that can help tailor the live discussion. This can result in a more attentive audience, new opportunities for communication, and moments of collective participation. Raise Hands – Inclusive Q&A Town hall is designed to scale to tens of thousands of viewers, but we haven’t forgotten the importance of letting individual voices be heard. We’re excited to bring the raise hand feature to town hall. When an audience member raises their hand, organizers and presenters are notified and can choose to bring that attendee on screen to ask a question or share a comment, with full audio and video. This is a game-changer for live Q&A sessions. Instead of relying solely on typed Q&A or pre-submitted questions, you can invite attendees to actively participate in the discussion. For event organizers, this feature means you can foster authentic, live interaction, even when presenting at scale. Town hall Graph API – Greater control and customization Microsoft Graph APIs empower organizations to integrate Teams town hall with the internal platforms and workflows they are already using. These APIs enable organizations to automate the entire event lifecycle, by creating, publishing, and canceling town halls directly from their own systems, eliminating manual steps and reducing operational overhead. Organizations can use Graph APIs to suppress default Teams notification emails and instead trigger their own internal email communications, ensuring consistent user experiences. An additional recent enhancement is resource-specific consent (RSC), which allows apps to request permissions scoped to a specific town hall (or webinar) rather than requiring global admin rights. This improves security, simplifies consent processes, and enables developers to build integrations that respect organizational boundaries, all while ensuring compliance and scalability for enterprise events. Teams town hall has evolved into a comprehensive platform that raises the bar for virtual and hybrid events. From ultra-low latency streaming and HD video that make your broadcast feel crisp and professional, to interactive features like polls and raise hands that turn passive viewers into active participants, town hall is built to engage audiences at scale. Town hall helps mitigate the challenges of hybrid work and delivers tools for co-located experiences and Teams Rooms system integration so you can connect with people across offices and geographies in one seamless event. All of these innovations are available to use today as part of the current town hall experience. Try them out to create more impactful, inclusive events for your audiences. Learn more about Teams Town hall and what is coming next: Teams Town hall adoption Hear more from our experts on how to execute successful town halls at scale: Customer Hub Read more about our best practices for hosting Town hall events in Teams Rooms: Teams town hall in Teams Rooms best practicesFrom Breakthroughs to Everyday Impact: Advanced Performance, Reliability, & User Experience in Teams
Written by: Jeff Chen, Catalin Ionut Fratila, Andrei Vieru, Ashish Rathore, Avinash Prasad, David Rosenthal, Fred Wu, David Zhao, Will Dixon and Kerry Perez Heffernan. At Microsoft, we know that speed and reliability are essential for Teams users—especially when you’re in the middle of an important meeting or collaborating with your team. When we rebuilt Teams in 2023, it marked a major leap forward in performance improvements, reflecting our deep commitment to listening to user needs and transforming feedback into tangible results. Our journey hasn’t stopped there. Every year, we push the boundaries of what Teams can do—introducing new performance enhancements, streamlined experiences, and thoughtful features. Since the redesigned chat and channels experience in 2024, we’ve built on that momentum with even more innovations in 2025. This blog outlines what we’ve achieved together this year. Always Fast & Responsiveness—Making Every Interaction Fluid Teams should feel fast and responsive, no matter your device or network. Thanks to your feedback and our engineering investments, we’ve made improvements across core Teams user interactions, including faster video loading time, faster application, launch time and faster switching to chat and channels across all Teams clients including Windows, Mac, and Mobile at 95 th percentile. Tracking performance metrics at the 95 th percentile signals if improvements apply to most users, including those with low-end devices and poor network conditions. In addition, we’ve systematically reduced layout shifts, flickers, and multi-pass rendering, using telemetry-driven prioritization to deliver a smoother, more delightful user experience. We’ve also evolved how Teams tracks the percentage of sessions that are fully responsive, that has resulted in major reductions in UI freezes and long delays. Together, these changes helps Teams feel more consistently fast and reliable for everyone. Reliability & Feedback—Listening and Improving Together While we’re proud of the progress so far, we know there’s always more to do. Your feedback keeps us grounded and focused on what matters: making Teams faster, more stable, and more enjoyable for you. Delivering a reliable experience at the scale of Microsoft Teams requires more than just monitoring technical metrics—it demands a deep understanding of real-world customer feedback and the ability to act on it quickly and intelligently. We turn feedback from every channel - whether it’s direct customer feedback, in-app reports, surveys, admin logs, or social media - into actionable insights, combining it with our reliability data to prioritize improvements that matter most. This ongoing validation ensures our metrics reflect real-world experiences and drive meaningful performance gains. Efficiency & Memory Management—Powerful Features, Light Footprint We understand that not all Teams issues are created equal. For some, a driver update on a laptop might trigger unexpected audio or video problems. For others, memory usage is a daily concern. We’re committed to working through these device-specific challenges, so Teams works reliably for everyone, everywhere on any devices. Delivering new features shouldn’t come at the cost of efficiency. That’s why our approach ensures Teams remains lightweight and resource-friendly. Over the past years, we have made improvements in following areas. Memory continues to be our top priority. With the improvements that we brought to new team for half memory consumption compared to classic Teams, we have deepened our partnership with Wv2 team and further reduced additional half of windows idle memory (now at 30% comparing to classic teams). Let’s unpack the details that make this possible Behind the Scenes – Delivering Performant Client at Scale Building a world-class collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams requires more than just feature innovation—it demands a disciplined approach to architecture, diagnostics, and customer partnership. Architecture Native Video Rendering: Fully embracing the hybrid desktop client architecture across web stack and native media technology, we have fundamentally rebuilt the API surface across web and native layers to simplify the video rendering in Teams meetings – this led to reduction of API calls over IPC by 40x when loading the meeting stage with 7x7 videos – resulting in 10% reduction in video loading time at 95 th percentile. Furthermore, the new simplified design significantly improved the video reliability and quality – with up to 36% reduction of video freezes and rendering failures. WebView2 Integration: Using WebView2 delivers a consistent rendering pipeline across Mac and Windows, accelerating feature rollout and enabling custom instrumentation for hard-to-debug edge cases. In addition, Teams performance is also greatly benefit from different integrations with Wv2 APIs. For example, the recent integration with IDBIndex: getAllRecords() method for faster chat and channel switch by 10%, and Set MemoryUsageTargetLevel, Empty Working Set for Windows Idle memory by 40% improvements Data Fetching: Granular cache partitioning contributed to chat switching speed improvements by 10%, with preloading and background prefetching in testing for further gains. This builds on work we shared in an earlier post macOS Optimizations: We’ve invested in making our macOS application feel just as fast and native as a fully native app. To achieve this, we not only take advantage of several macOS-specific optimizations (i.e. populate the dyld caches after installation, run gktool post launch). These leads to 50% application launch time improvements that are specific to Mac. Mobile meeting battery consumption: As part of our targeted performance improvements for meetings, we optimized background processing, improved resource reuse through smarter caching, reduced millions of allocations, and delivered an efficient experience for our mobile users. Diagnostics Operating at global scale requires proactive detection and rapid remediation. Root causing unresponsiveness issues at scale: We know that freezes or hangs can be tough to diagnose, so we've improved how we collect and analyze data across platforms. By enhancing instrumentation in WebView2 and using better telemetry—like capturing native process data—we can more easily spot patterns and fix desktop or native issues. We also use efficient event tracing (ETW) to gather targeted insights, helping us quickly identify, fix, and prevent problems before they impact users. Advanced Telemetry & Leak Detector Service: Automated anomaly detection and real-time diagnostics continuously monitor memory leaks, grouping similar issues and prioritizing fixes. This approach reduced major leak rates to less than 1%, improving stability across millions of users. Customer Partnership We co-design with enterprise customers to validate improvements in real-world environments and align engineering priorities with business needs. This collaboration ensures Teams delivers measurable value—speed, reliability, and efficiency—where it matters most. We have kept in mind customer bandwidth consumption during updates and have implemented smarter mechanisms such as Delivery Optimization (P2P downloads) and a Distributed Update schedule. An important aspect of all this extensive work and new functionality is for customers to make sure they are updating to the latest version of the Teams client This not only ensures they are getting the latest security updates and improvements but also is how we deliver all these significant performance enhancements. We have recently released the Teams Client Health dashboard in Teams Admin Center to help customers ensure their users are always on the latest versions. Looking Forward Our journey doesn’t stop here. We’re pushing for even higher responsiveness, further memory reductions, and greater efficiency for 2026. We’ll continue to invest in platform, framework, and telemetry innovations to sustain and extend Teams’ performance leadership. Thank you for sharing your stories, frustrations, and suggestions. Every customer interaction, post, and survey response helps us build a better Teams. We’re on this journey together, and your experience is at the heart of every improvement we make.Accelerate frontline adoption of Microsoft Teams on personal devices
Frontline workers are the heartbeat of your organization and they need quick, secure access to Microsoft Teams to stay connected and productive. Yet, for many companies, onboarding Teams on a personal device can feel like a maze of extra steps due to security and compliance requirements. That’s where our new web-based onboarding experience comes in. This solution is designed to simplify and accelerate setup for frontline workers, ensuring they can start collaborating on their first day. This guide is intended to be used on a desktop kiosk or a shared PC at the work site. This guided experience walks them through every step to get Teams up and running on their mobile device. Check out the video below to see the experience in action: Key benefits Frontline efficiency: Every minute counts. A streamlined onboarding process means workers spend less time troubleshooting and more time serving customers. Security without complexity: Organizations often enforce MFA, app protection policies and conditional access policies. Our experience adapts dynamically to these requirements, so compliance doesn’t slow you down. Consistency at scale: No more creating custom guides or relying on word-of-mouth instructions. This experience ensures every worker follows the same secure, tested process. How it works 1. Start Onboarding: On a kiosk or shared PC, go to https://aka.ms/getfrontlineteams. Choose your device and sign in with your work credentials. 2. Download Required Apps: Based on your organization’s policies, you may need Microsoft Authenticator or Company Portal. Scan the QR code to download apps and complete the guided steps indicated in the wizard. 3. Install Teams: Scan the QR code to download Teams, sign in, and you’re ready to go! Next steps Check out our frontline worker session at Microsoft Ignite: Don't gatekeep AI: Empower, secure, scalable innovations for frontline on Friday, November 21 at 2:30pmET. This session features Principal Product Manager Vishal Anil and Product Marketing Director Jeremy Carlson on stage in San Francisco to talk about unlocking productivity and efficiency with innovative AI-powered solutions tailored for frontline-specific workflows and mobile first experiences. Explore our learn docs for details about improving onboarding of Teams for frontline on personal devices.Delivering new webinar experiences with Microsoft Teams
Today, we’re excited to share how we’ve evolving the webinar experience in Teams, both the new advanced webinars within Teams Premium generally available now and existing webinars within Office 365 and Microsoft 365 offerings. Below, we’ll take a closer look at how Microsoft Teams is delivering new engaging and richer digital-first event experiences.Turn off Mirror my video in Microsoft Teams meetings to match your video to your audience's view
We are thrilled to announce that we have started rolling out Mirror my video feature for our Windows and MAC desktop apps. In the last six months, there’s been a growing request from teachers and more to be able to turn off the mirroring of one’s video preview in a Microsoft Teams meeting.Enhancing Screen Sharing with AV1 in Microsoft Teams
In today’s digital-first world, the ability to share content seamlessly during virtual meetings is not just a convenience; it is a necessity. Microsoft Teams, one of the leaders in virtual collaboration , has embraced this need by integrating the AV1 video codec for screen sharing, enhancing the user experience, especially in poor network conditions.
