Microsoft to let users disable message previews

Sep 16, 2020 11:15 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft Teams is a product whose adoption skyrocketed in the last six months or so, especially as more people moved to working from home due to obvious reasons.

And next month, Microsoft will finally release a notification feature that many people have been waiting for and which, to be honest, should have been there from the very beginning.

It’s an option to disable message previews in the toast notification, a setting that’s as simple as it is essential. Just begin notified that a new message is available is more than enough for most people, especially if they don’t want the content to be exposed due to privacy reasons.

The new feature will be enabled by default, so Microsoft Teams will continue to show message previews just like before. Users will have to disable the toggle from the Settings screen.

More features

Earlier this month, Microsoft has also announced new capabilities for users, including a so-called Spotlight tool.

“Meeting organizers and presenters will be able to lock their video as the main view for all meeting participants. This helps the presenter control the main video feed that a participant sees during the meeting. This is different from “Pin participant”, which allows an individual to pin a video feed for their own view but not for the view of all meeting participants. Spotlight will be available in the next few month,” the company says.

General availability of Spotlight, however, still doesn’t come with an ETA and for now, more specifics are yet to be shared.

For now, we don’t have a date when the new notification option is supposed to go live but expect Microsoft to roll out an official announcement for everybody when this happens officially across its Teams client on the desktop.