Microsoft Teams: custom backgrounds are coming in April!

….well, kind of custom. Microsoft have just announced that the much anticipated feature that it first demonstrated way back in 2019, will be rolled out to General Availability this month (April 2020). And if you’ve ever had any kind of meeting with any Microsoft employee, you’ll know that they’ve been showing off this functionality for the best part of 6 months.

However, Microsoft have named this feature “background effects in Teams meetings”. This is because the first release will only allow for users to select from a predefined set of background images. There are currently around 25 to choose from, also allowing users to choose the existing blur option too.

It would seem that in all likelihood Microsoft will follow suit with other competitors and bring out green screen’esque functionality, where users can add their own background pictures to any video call. We’re guessing that the enterprise governance functionality would have to be deployed around this before any roll out of full customisation feature like that to prevent any misuse.