This new feature in Teams is easily overlooked, since it only shows next to attendees in a meeting: the ability to pin/spotlight a person’s video feed into screen. When you use this, you can “focus/spotlight” on specific person’s video – and it doesn’t matter who is talking. This is very useful in all hands / town hall meetings when you want the main camera to be visible.
Every person’s name is followed by the magic … menu that opens two actions: Mute or Pin participant.
When a participant is pinned to screen you can choose to Unpin or Fit to frame. The latter shows the actual video, not a cropped version.
Overall, while this is a “small” feature it is most useful – especially when you are showing your meeting on larger screen. This doesn’t do the pinning to other persons, this is purely affecting your personal view.
Principal Consultant and Microsoft MVP working on Metaverse and Future Work
Microsoft Teams is the main portal for Microsoft's Metaverse, allowing to create new business models and processes connecting people, applications, data and files with the help of digital fabric AI. Immersive Metaverse and meetings enable new ways how to meet, work, collaborate and share experiences together. Microsoft Mesh for Teams will enable everyone to participate - with PC/mobile or with Mixed Reality devices such as HoloLens. This story is start beginning and I am guiding you and your organization on the road.
I am extremely passionate about Metaverse and how it - with Microsoft Teams - enable to change how people work together now and in the future.
Microsoft Mesh, Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Graph, Azure and other pillars of the Microsoft Cloud are building blocks to Metaverse.
View all posts by Vesa Nopanen "Mr. Metaverse"
4 thoughts on “Teams Meetings: video spotlight (pin a meeting participant)”
This article incorrectly associates the Microsoft Teams pin feature with the Skype for Business focus/spotlight feature which are NOT the same. Teams only affects local view, “focus/spotlight” affects all participants in skype for business. So this article appears to just be clickbait. 😦
I’m looking forward to when Microsoft reaches feature parity in Microsoft Teams with the old Skype for Business capabilities.
I am sorry you feel this is a clickbait. I used the term spotlight since for the user (year and half ago) it gave idea what to expect. But I also stated that is affecting only personally the user – not everyone.
I would not compare Skype for Business and Teams head on anymore in features. Teams has lots of more use cases that make it pointless. Some SkypeFB features can be accomplished differently. Overall less and less people are using SkypeFB.
It will allow presenter to “lock” the video feed to meeting participants and thus making sure everyone has the same video feed (like a teacher or CEO for example) .
Vesa Nopanen - My Metaverse Day 
This article incorrectly associates the Microsoft Teams pin feature with the Skype for Business focus/spotlight feature which are NOT the same. Teams only affects local view, “focus/spotlight” affects all participants in skype for business. So this article appears to just be clickbait. 😦
I’m looking forward to when Microsoft reaches feature parity in Microsoft Teams with the old Skype for Business capabilities.
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I am sorry you feel this is a clickbait. I used the term spotlight since for the user (year and half ago) it gave idea what to expect. But I also stated that is affecting only personally the user – not everyone.
I would not compare Skype for Business and Teams head on anymore in features. Teams has lots of more use cases that make it pointless. Some SkypeFB features can be accomplished differently. Overall less and less people are using SkypeFB.
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https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-teams-will-soon-get-the-ability-to-spotlight-an-individual-video-participant-in-a-meeting
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Indeed – the true Spotlight feature is coming to Teams! It should start it’s rollout during September, according to the roadmap: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=67090
It will allow presenter to “lock” the video feed to meeting participants and thus making sure everyone has the same video feed (like a teacher or CEO for example) .
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