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Branding your company's Teams meetings and calls with frosted glass effects (Tue, 15 Oct 2024)
Microsoft Teams continues to innovate, and one of the latest features to enhance your meetings and calls is the frosted glass background effect. This feature allows you to brand your company's Teams meetings and calls in a professional and visually appealing way. Every Teams user can manually upload individual frosted glass backgrounds. Teams Premium administrators can also upload frosted glass backgrounds for their organization and assign those backgrounds to different teams based on customization policies. Here's how you can make the most of this feature.   Transform transparent PNGs into frosted glass backgrounds Teams turns any transparent PNG background image into a frosted glass background. This means you can use your company's logo with a transparent background to create a branded and polished look for your Teams calls. The frosted glass effect adds a touch of elegance and ensures that your logo stands out.   Strategic logo placement Transparent backgrounds give you flexibility in logo placement. You can position your logo anywhere on the transparent background, whether it's in the center or in any corner, to enhance visibility. This allows you to customize the look and feel of your Teams calls to align with your company's branding guidelines. You achieve this level of customization by changing where in your transparent PNG background you place your logo.   Professional and clean video appearance You can also use an image without transparency to brand your meeting. Non-transparent backgrounds will fully replace your actual background. This may look a little jarring to the eye if the lighting conditions in the actual background differ significantly from the lighting conditions in the background replacement. The frosted glass by contrast creates a more natural look where the person and background share lighting conditions. This effect is reminiscent of the corner office with a frosted glass wall. To further enhance this effect, meeting participants can turn on the “adjust brightness” filter in Teams video settings. This ensures that your video appearance is always top-notch, regardless of your physical environment. This effect works across the platforms on which you may already be using Teams: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and the web.   Different branding styles for different teams You can choose different frosted glass backgrounds for different teams within your organization. For example, the Sales team could have a different logo than the Service team or the Legal team. You control this by assigning different policies to different teams in the Teams Admin Center. This level of customization allows each team to have a unique identity while maintaining a cohesive overall brand. You could even embed messages like “attorney client privileged” in your Legal team’s frosted glass background.   Enforce specific background effects To ensure consistency across all Teams calls, Teams admins can enforce the use of specific background effects by marking a background as required in the Teams Admin Center. This gives your Teams admin full control over how your company shows up both in internal and external Teams meetings and calls. By standardizing the background, you can maintain a professional and unified appearance for all your virtual meetings and calls.   Tips & Tricks For best results when preparing the PNG image, please keep in mind: Resolution: Use 1920x1080 pixels for a high-quality background Avoid full opacity: Colored content such as logos looks best with a little transparency. We recommend 75% opacity : A Gaussian blur of radius 2 works well to simulate a bit of depth of field in the scene. Stencil mid-gray foreground: For grayscale PNG with transparency, we recommend having the full image in mid-gray (value 128) so that the transparency pattern is visible on both light and dark backgrounds.   Get started with Frosted Glass Backgrounds To start using frosted glass backgrounds, follow the instructions on the Microsoft Teams support page for custom meeting backgrounds here. Teams Admins can deploy frosted glass and other backgrounds company wide. Individual users can manually upload transparent logos as backgrounds to achieve the frosted glass effect for their own meetings. Check with your IT admin about acquiring a Microsoft Teams Premium license. Try or buy Teams Premium today.
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Celebrating World Mental Health Day: Tech tips and tricks to support your workday (Thu, 10 Oct 2024)
Amid the hustle and bustle of modern life, managing stress and staying productive at work can be overwhelming. It’s no surprise that mental health is the leading disability globally, with 1 in 4 adults affected by mental health conditions at some point of their lives. Despite its prevalence, it remains one of the most stigmatized and hidden disabilities, with 75% of people living with mental health conditions not seeking the help they need. This results in over $1 trillion in lost productivity each year. This World Mental Health Day, we’re sharing our team’s productivity tips to support your workday. Stay focused on what matters most to you In a world filled with constant notifications, chats, meetings, and action items, staying focused can seem like an insurmountable task. This constant context-switching strains our cognitive energy and can leave us feeling uneasy. Finding ways to help manage these distractions can be an important contributor toward reducing stress.  One of our favorite features is using Viva Insights, which allows you to schedule uninterrupted blocks of time in your calendar so you can concentrate on specific tasks.   You can also customize your notification settings in both Windows and Teams to significantly reduce the noise and help you stay focused. Navigate to the settings menu and tailor the notifications to fit your workflow. You can decide which notifications are essential and which can wait, ensuring that only the most important alerts grab your attention. Moreover, you can now customize the sound of your notifications too. Whether you want to mute notification sounds when you are busy or in a meeting, or you want to assign a specific sound for urgent messages, you can now tailor your notification experience to better meet your needs.   Stay on top of your work Effective task management can help reduce worry that you might be forgetting upcoming deadlines. In Teams you can organize and prioritize your tasks efficiently. Use the right-click functionality to create a new task in planner from a chat, pin important messages to the top of the chat so you can revert to the message with ease, and you can even create automated flows like getting reminders to follow up on a message. This helps you stay on top of your day without feeling overwhelmed.   With AI changing the way we work, we understand that at times, the most difficult part is how to get started. For instance, you can ask Copilot to organize your inbox so you can focus on what matters most, with a prompt such as: "Summarize my inbox for unread messages today. Try to ignore anything that seems like junk mail. Categorize them in a table in order of priority, where 1st priority is emails that expect a reply, and 2nd priority is where I'm on the To line, and 3rd priority is where I'm just on cc."   Many of us experience the pressure that comes from having back-to-back meetings with little time to prepare ahead of the meeting. With Business Chat, you can get ahead of your pre-meeting preparation by referencing conversations from previous meetings to ensure you're following up with the right items and gaining additional insights into who you are meeting with. Copilot can also review meeting documents and suggest a list of anticipated questions that may come up, to make sure you're well informed and ready to engage.   After the meeting you can take the Copilot summaries and action items to then draft follow-up emails, thanking participants and outlining the next steps, making the post-meeting process seamless and efficient.    Bring your very best forward Staying engaged during meetings can be challenging for many of us, due to digital distractions, virtual fatigue, and the tendency to multitask. Unfortunately, most of these meetings also lack the interactive elements that in-person would offer which can be a contributor to the disengagement. On top of all that, working from home or in remote locations can bring its own distractions and technical issues which can further disrupt focus.   With voice isolation and decorate your background features, you can minimize distractions and show up your best. With voice isolation, you can be sure only your voice is heard clearly and distinctly during conversations. With decorate your background, you don’t have to worry about where you are or what is being seen in your video calls, using AI you can blend your physical and digital spaces to revamp what is seen of your physical meeting space. During the meeting, Copilot in Teams can help with summaries of the discussion, capturing key points and decisions made, ensuring that nothing is overlooked. Copilot can also recommend follow-up questions to ongoing discussions and even propose next steps. And for those of us who may not be native to the language that is being spoken, you can make the most of your contributions with live translated captions and transcripts, and even querying Copilot in the preferred language. Removing the stress that language barriers may bring.     Express Yourself and Create Fun Expressing yourself creatively during your workday can have a positive impact on both your productivity and mental well-being. When you show your authentic self to your professional environment, it fosters a sense of belonging and satisfaction. This creative expression can break the monotony of routine tasks, making your work more enjoyable and less stressful.   Moreover, it encourages open communication and collaboration with colleagues. Customized emojis, personalized backgrounds, and fun GIFs can lighten the mood and create a more dynamic and engaging atmosphere.   These small touches can help boost your morale, enhance your creativity, and ultimately lead to a more fulfilling and productive workday.   Bonus tip: Getting a Usefully Wrong Start and a helpful polish ‘Writers block’ can set in when we are under stress and finding it difficult to get our ideas down on paper. Did you know that this blog was written with the help of Copilot?  Copilot can help you get started by providing a preliminary draft, even if it's not perfect. This "usefully wrong" start can spark your creativity and help you overcome the initial hurdle of putting words on the page.   Once you have a draft, Copilot can act as your personal writing coach, offering suggestions to refine and polish your work. This ensures that your final product is both professional and reflective of your best efforts.     These are just a few examples of how you can use Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot to stay focused and productive, to learn more about Microsoft Accessibility or ask questions here.  
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