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Written: 20/08/2023 | Updated: N/A
I was over in the Republic of Ireland this week. And not only did I get to visit Microsoft. I also got to see a good part of the northern counties of Meath and Cavan on the way to visiting a client. It’s an absolutely stunning part of the world. And that’s my first takeaway this week – go visit there if you ever have the opportunity to do so. But also, in all the meetings I had whilst I was away Teams still featured prominently. Almost seven years in and we are still talking about at length what it can do. We are still talking about its rapid development with either more good stuff going in, or more good stuff being refined. Teams 2.1 features prominently at this point. So too does Teams Premium and Microsoft 365 Copilot. But there’s still a lot to talk about when it comes to the fundamentals of voice, and meeting rooms, and apps, and files and optimising networking. And so – like last week – I am going to ad-hoc cover two features which I haven’t looked into up until today. The first is the ability for the user to set themes in the Teams 2.1. client, such as light or dark, or better still classic. Yes, we can now go back to the classic purple should we choose – and yes, before you ask in my experience these things do matter to some users in terms of consistency and visuals. Secondly we’ll look at enforcing explicit recording consent where users have to consent to themselves being recorded. This is defined by Microsoft as ‘When the policy is applied, the Teams meeting window will request explicit consent of all participants to be recorded. Before a user gives consent, the user’s audio, video, and screenshare/consent-share won’t be captured in the meeting recording’. Now, why would we use that? Well, imagine my job meant that I had to provide meeting recordings to an undisclosed third party for review of sensitive feedback attendees gave in those meetings. I can’t just record, that could be illegal or infringe upon some compliance policy. So I explicitly need your consent here. And in effect, until you give your consent you will be effectively hard muted and passive until you do so, or leave. Makes sense. But I would ask – is this right at whole-policy scope? As opposed to being a meeting option applied via a policy? Let’s have a look and see.
Let’s go!
This blog will cover:
- Changing Themes in Teams 2.1
- Enabling explicit recording consent
- FAQ
Note this blog will have abridged steps which will assume some experience with Teams, the Teams Admin Centre and PowerShell. This will be used on Teams Desktop using a Ring 4 Test Tenant. All blogs will use the new Teams Desktop Client 2.1+ where possible.
Prerequisites
- Teams Administrator or Global Administrator permissions
- Microsoft 365 Licence with Teams for testing
CHANGING THEMES IN TEAMS 2.1
So one of the issues that Teams administrators will face with the new Teams 2.1. client will be that specfic users don’t like the colour. By default, this follows the operating system theme and is not the classic purple that we have become accustomed to, and which many love, over the years.
1.) In the top right of the client select More Options (…) next to the Avatar, then Settings
2.) From the left menu, select Appearance and Accessibility
3.) From the dropdown under Theme, select Light, Dark, Classic or High Contrast. This example will go with Classic
4.) The Teams Desktop client changes to the classic theme, which should be more familiar to users. This also shows changing the theme to Dark which some users may also use.
5.) It is important to point out in the theme section of the options you can also enforce the traditional dark mode for meetings too. Scary, as I can remember when it was first introduced.
Our work here is done. All super straightforward. But is there a way to change or set this programatically? Doing some investigation the theme itself is defined in a local JSON file called app_settings.json which is located in the cache at
%localappdata%\packages\MSTeams_8wekyb3d8bbwe\Localcache\Microsoft\MSTeams
Open the JSON file and the Theme is defined/specified in the first line
Where testing, the themes correspond as follows:
- “theme”:0 – Light
- “theme”:0 – Classic
- “theme”:1 – Dark
- “theme”:2 – High Contrast
- “theme”:3 – Follow Operating System Settings
Trying to amend the theme value in the json file works – but this gets overwritten as soon as the Teams app is opened or the theme is changed within the desktop app. Same behaviour occurs when ripping and replacing the app_settings.json file. So currently it doesn’t look like that changes to the json file control changes to the teams client (which if it did then there may be the possibility of controlling it via GPO or Intune), and at the time of writing I am unaware of any PowerShell functionality to set a specific theme as default, or lock a theme centrally. Maybe this is something we will see in the future but for now it looks like a user led functionality.
ENABLING EXPLICIT RECORDING CONSENT
Moving onto enabling explicit recording consent I saw this in a Message Centre notification today and just thought I would try it in the 2.1 client. This requires Teams Administrator permissions and PowerShell needs to be used. The message centre states that it will be in the Teams Admin Centre at some point, however this hasn’t surfaced at the time of writing
1.) Fire up a PowerShell session as an admin and connect to Microsoft Teams using the command
Connect-MicrosoftTeamsYou may need to authenticate as the administrator
2.) Use the following command to get the meeting policy. In this example, the global org wide default policy will be used
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Global"Find ExplicitRecordingConsent. This should be set to Disabled by default
3.) Use the following comand to enable
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Global" -ExplicitRecordingConsent "Enabled"
4.) Check back with get to ensure it’s enabled
5.) Our job here is done. A meeting has been set and joined by Chris and Adam. Chris selects More Options (…) then Record and Transcribe then Start Recording
6.) The prompt says to the recorder (Chris) agreement by attendees is needed first, select Continue
7.) Recording starts. The notification for the recorder (Chris) states it asks others to consent.
8.) For the attendee (Adam), the notification states that turning on the camera, mic or sharing screen constitutes consent to the recording.
9.) By doing any one of these actions the attendee (Adam) has to select Yes
10.) The attendee (Adam) then has a notification that they have agreed to be recorded.
FAQ
Q. Is there any prerequisites for these?
A. Update to the latest client in both cases. For explicit meeting consent the engagement report has to be enabled which is done in the meeting policy within the TAC
Per the message centre notification,
- In meetings requiring explicit consent, users joining from unsupported endpoints, such as older client versions and CarPlay, will not be able to enable their mic, camera, or screenshare/content-sharing during recording.
- Teams meeting rooms user and PSTN users can still get recording notifications as of today, but they cannot provide explicit recording consent, and their consent data will be logged as “not applicable” or “auto consent”.
Q. Wouldn’t the explicit recording consent be better as a meeting option?
A. I see both sides. It is a great feature and works seemlessly, however the way it is implemented now the feature is applied at a policy scope which means that it will be applied for every recording in every meeting which the user who has the policy records. I may get unwieldy. But the flip side of this is that every user who comes off mic or turns on their cam or shares their screen has to consent and if they mean to do that, will do that.
Q. Shouldn’t people just accept the new client and theme?
A. In my experience many people like familiarity and others like change. Having the option benefits both without the exclusion of one or the other
Q. Will there be a centralised way to manage themes moving forward?
A. I imagine so, given that backgrounds, voice settings, and many more other things started off life as being purely user controlled. However I can’t confirm it, nor give a timeframe – more like it’s a gut feeling that something in the future will come through to manage those themes and set a default. There could already be something or a way I am just not aware of.
@Microsoft365Pro 