Custom Filters. Defined by Microsoft as follows: 'a new feature in Microsoft Teams Meetings that will allow participants to augment their video streams with visual effects such as frames and styles. [They are] built on the Teams Platform infrastructure and provided by Microsoft first and third-party partners as apps and displayed as a collection of filters'. Sound good? Well they have now surfaced into preview, expected GA in February. But if we look back into the history of Teams then filters themselves aren't strictly a new functionality. They have been around for at least three years (half of Teams life): and were certainly being used by IT Pros when custom backgrounds were introduced back in 2020 through third party apps such as Snapchat and OBS which leveraged virtual cam. Microsoft then introduced Soft Focus and Adjust Brightness - which are also Filters - later in 2022. So at this point, we have backgrounds, Avatars on the way, and we now have Filters, too. All native, all options for the meeting. But like backgrounds, and like Avatars, Filters are going to provoke the same questions and spark the same discussions. Can we control them? Do we allow our users to use them? The old famous just because we can doesn't mean we should. Will they be a fad? Will they add richness to the meeting? We come face to face once again with those hard subjects of culture and identity and expression and bias. Luckily, I will leave that to you to decide. Here's how to configure them, with a few pertinent questions for the administrator such as - do they work with Teams Meeting Recordings, and are they compliant to meeting policies?