Microsoft Teams is getting a new feature — and Zoom should be worried

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Dynamic View, coming in March, should make video presentations more bearable

Microsoft Teams Dynamic View
(Image credit: Microsoft/LinkedIn)

Sitting through endless Zoom meetings can drain the life out of you. Sure, there are some occasionally fun backgrounds to stare at, but it's mostly a cumbersome set of screens switching back and forth. But Microsoft Teams is getting ready to a new view to your work-at-home experience.

Among the features coming to Teams is a new way to keep meeting attendees focused described in a Microsoft post as "Dynamic View." The feature is meant to let you see meeting participants and presentation content side-by side, while also being able to customize how that information appears on your screen.

With Dynamic View, you get a customizable view of how you want to see content being shared. You’ll be able to pin participants you want to keep track of on-screen instead of having to search for them in a sidebar. You should also be able to better see when a new speaker has begun participating as well as when someone has "raised their hand" during a meeting.

Contrast that with watching presentations and screen shares in services like Zoom. Typically, you see the screen and nothing else except the same lineup of faces on top of the screen. 

We first got wind of Dynamic View back in July 2020 when it was announced alongside a series of other Microsoft Teams features designed to make video meetings more visually interesting and productive. But now we’ve got a target date for Dynamic View — Microsoft’s road map lists it as arriving in March.

Additional Teams updates in the past year have included live transcription, live reactions, speaker identification tools, and an integrated task app work in tandem to make Teams the more flexible and user-friendly option. These changes have gone a long way toward making Teams feel more like the no-brainer choice for large-scale business meetings and classrooms than a sigh-inducing headache that everyone tolerates. 

Brittany Vincent
Brittany Vincent

Brittany Vincent has been covering video games and tech for over 13 years for publications including Tom's Guide, MTV, Rolling Stone, CNN, Popular Science, Playboy, IGN, GamesRadar, Polygon, Kotaku, Maxim, and more. She's also appeared as a panelist at video game conventions like PAX East and PAX West and has coordinated social media for companies like CNET. When she's not writing or gaming, she's looking for the next great visual novel in the vein of Saya no Uta. You can follow her on Twitter @MolotovCupcake.