Microsoft Teams - Custom Background Images - Coming Soon!

Since September 2018 Microsoft has had the option to blur your video background when in a call, at the time a heavily requested feature from the Skype for Business era. Since then however not much has changed with the video options in Teams and products like Zoom have introduced the idea of having a custom background when in a call.

Now, with so many more video calls happening each day, Microsoft has responded to this requirement with the announcement on their roadmap update from the 3rd of April, that the long awaited custom background feature is coming to Microsoft Teams.

This feature will start rolling out to all users during April, and as with all Microsoft updates this feature will slowly enter the wild, with different tenants and groups of users receiving this update at different times. However we expect that all users will have access to this by the end of the month.

The feature itself is going to be limited at launch to images provided by Microsoft, which you can see in the attached image. However, this is expected to be a launch restriction and we would expect to see full custom images releasing with-in a few months.

This giving you complete flexibility to use an image of your own office, company branding or anything else you want to hide your messy home office!

In the meantime if you want a custom wallpaper then you can always use applications like Snap Camera. Which allows you to work round this restriction, however it is not officially supported by Microsoft.

Are you looking forward to being able to use custom backgrounds to reduce your home office embarrassment or is this feature not something you would use?

I know I certainly am looking forward to being able to present a more controlled video experience in the future with Microsoft Teams.