Microsoft Teams meetings are getting chat bubbles and 98-person Gallery view

Rabia Noureen

Microsoft Teams Meetings

Microsoft is introducing a new paging experience for Large Gallery view in Teams. The new feature is now available with the latest public preview update, and it can now show up to 98 participants in two 7×7 grids of the gallery view.

The Microsoft Teams desktop app introduced support for Large Gallery view back in July last year. It allows users to view up to 49 (most active) participants on a single screen, but the public preview version of the app now supports up to 98 video feeds in two 7×7 video grids. “When you choose Large Gallery view, and if there are more than 49 videos, navigation controls < and > would appear below the Large Gallery and you can use these controls to view or engage with more video participants,” the company explained.

The new pagination experience is now enabled by default for all public preview users on both Windows and Mac. To use this new feature, head to the navigation controls available at the bottom of the Large Gallery view in a Teams meeting. From the navigation menu, click the “< or >” button to view or engage with more participants.

In addition to this new paging feature, Microsoft Teams meetings are also getting support for chat bubbles. This new capability should make it easier for participants to follow chat messages by showing a floating notification at the top of the meeting screen. It should eliminate the need to open a chat window to view chat messages manually.

The software gaint has recently announced via Microsoft 365 admin center that this feature is currently under development and will start rolling out to the Teams desktop clients in mid-July. Let us know in the comments below if you think that these updates will help to improve your meeting experience in Teams.