Making Microsoft Teams meetings more engaging

Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences

Video meetings traditionally limit each person to one device, hindering the ways that people can participate, share, and interact. Microsoft Teams empowers users to achieve more by using their computer and phone together as companions in video meetings to present live mobile video, present photos you take or from in your camera roll, present your mobile screen, remote control PowerPoint, and even seamlessly move your meeting between devices.

These features are being released for Microsoft Teams on desktop, web, iOS, and Android over the course of 2018. Your access to features may vary during the release period.

Companion Experiences for Microsoft Teams meetings were a collaboration between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Research Cambridge UK. The features developed from a Hackathon project featured in the 2018 Garage Wall of Fame.

Research contributors

  • Hackathon: Kenton O’Hara, Sean Rintel, Abigail Sellen, Bob Corish, David Sweeney, Phil Gossett, and Gavin Smyth. Nick Chen, Advait Sarkar, Jane Gruning, and Stephanie Neumann helped with the hackathon video.
  • Project: Kenton O’Hara, Sean Rintel, Tony Wieser, Martin Grayson, Vassily Lyusatrev, Bob Corish, and Mike Armstrong. Oversight from Abigail Sellen and John Bronskill.
  • Special thanks to Chris Bishop, Director of the Cambridge Lab, for consistent support, and Richard Harper and Bill Buxton for early inspiration. Roman Rädle also deserves special thanks for being central to building the post-Hackathon proof-of-concept.
  • Other FTEs, interns, and contractors who contributed over the course of the project were Henrik Sorensen, Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Behnaz Rostami Yegaheh, Kagonya Awori, Jens Emil Grønbæk, Mario Schreiner, Francesca Salvadori, and Ding Wang. Safinaz Büyükgüzel, Anusha Iver, Ruixue Liu, Christian Naesseth, Joseph Newbold, Sunil Rodger, Steindor Saemundsson, Hayden Scott-Baron, Banu Saatci, and Matthew Johnson helped with the release video.

Product Contributors

  • Brian MacDonald, CVP of Microsoft Teams, championed the project.
  • Graham Sheldon, Mark Swift, and Jigar Thakkar provided LT support.
  • Our collaborators in the thick of the work were the Modern Meetings and Mobile teams, distributed between Bellevue and Prague: Amey Parandekar, Ewin Davis Kannuthottiyil, Ruchir Astavans, Swati Jhawar, Jindrich Parus, Kevin Morrison, Jason Faulkner, Philipp Steinacher, and Dominic Rödel.
Date:

Watch Next