Customizing Teams Look and Feel

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About this lesson

Learn how to add your profile picture and customize other features to suit your personal preferences - and why that is important.

Quick reference

Customizing Teams Look and Feel

Customize the look and feel of Teams to suit your personal preference.

When to use

Personalize your notifications experience, theme, photo, as well as setup voicemail, ringtones and other settings.

Instructions

Most of the customizations are located in the Settings options:

General:

- Themes are Default, Dark, and High Contrast. These can be useful to change if your office lighting needs a brighter or darker display. High contrast can be helpful for those who are visually impaired.

- Application choices do not usually need be adjusted. Language settings can be adjusted here, however the defaults will be those of your operating system.

- Privacy: of general interest is the ability to block calls from people who do not have caller ID. This will only be applicable of you have a Microsoft 365 plan with a calling plan so that you can be dialed using a phone number and it rings in teams. 

- Notifications: spend some time tuning this for your needs. Teams can sometimes be too "chatty".

- Devices: Set audio and video settings for those with multiple choices.

- Permissions: Settings to enable or disable Media, Location, Notifications, External Links, and MIDI devices. Disabling MIDI devices is unlikely to have an impact on you unless are using them in your environment. On the other hand, disabling Media access (camera, microphone, speakers) would mean you could only use your keyboard to interact with Teams. That may be desirable if you are on an untrusted network.

Calls: Enable or disable voicemail, configure voicemail, set ringtones and enable TTY mode for accessibility.

Hints & tips

  • One feature that can be very useful in the right circumstances is in Settings->Notifications->Status->Manage Notifications. On this screen you indicate that you want to be notified of a change in online status for a user. In this way, if someone is offline and you want to know the moment they are available, you will receive a notification the instant their status changes to online. 
  • Setup -> Devices allows you to select your best webcam if you have more than one as well as pick a microphone and speakers.
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  • 00:05 So now that you've got Teams installed and you know your way around a little bit,
  • 00:10 let's take a look at how you can customize user interface for
  • 00:13 a better Team's experience all up.
  • 00:15 Most all of the settings that we're interested in here are over under this
  • 00:19 icon which is a placeholder for you.
  • 00:22 This has your personal representation.
  • 00:25 In this case, it just has the initials of whoever's logged in, unless you add
  • 00:30 a picture, which I strongly recommend, as it adds a personality to Teams, which is
  • 00:34 kind of hard to describe, but easy to see, and I'll show you what I mean.
  • 00:39 So let's just upload a picture and click Save.
  • 00:44 And now your picture is displayed at the Activity Feed and
  • 00:47 in other places in Office 365 as well.
  • 00:49 Let me show you what this looks like on a site with more users and activity.
  • 00:53 On a Team site that has a little more action you can see that the pictures
  • 00:56 make the site feel quite a bit warmer.
  • 00:59 When you hover over a user you can see their contact card with
  • 01:02 their picture fully displayed.
  • 01:05 This can be really useful to verify that the person that you want to speak to is
  • 01:08 actually the right person because sometimes you can remember visually and
  • 01:12 not necessarily their name.
  • 01:13 In addition to that, whenever you go and you look at the contact information,
  • 01:18 it helps to see faces here instead of just initials.
  • 01:21 Going back to the Customization settings,
  • 01:23 if you click on the profile picture and you click Settings,
  • 01:26 you'll see a bunch of different settings you can adjust to suit your preferences.
  • 01:31 You can adjust the theme to be default, which is what we see here.
  • 01:35 Or there's also a darker theme that's available that some people prefer.
  • 01:39 There's not a lot of choices here, but you do have these two and
  • 01:42 then a high contrast setting for people that are visually impaired.
  • 01:47 Privacy settings can be quite useful if you want to make sure that you are not
  • 01:51 disturbed whenever you are in Do Not Disturb mode.
  • 01:54 Privacy settings allow you to control various activities related to alerts and
  • 01:59 also notifications that may interrupt whenever you're in a meeting or
  • 02:03 some other private activity.
  • 02:05 When you set your status to do not disturb, you have the option by clicking
  • 02:09 Manage priority access to let specific individuals pass through your
  • 02:14 do not disturb settings to be able to receive a notification.
  • 02:16 So, if you're on notice, for example, to perform service for IT and
  • 02:21 you're on priority hot call list to 911 list, then you may want to always receive
  • 02:27 certain kinds of urgent notifications and you can put those settings here.
  • 02:31 Speaking of notifications, Teams is replete with notifications and
  • 02:35 pop ups and alerts about activity that's going on.
  • 02:39 In fact, it might be a little too chatty for some people's tastes.
  • 02:43 So if someone wants to personally mention you, which we'll cover in a later lesson,
  • 02:47 using an app mentioned, you'll get a notification about that occurring.
  • 02:52 You will also get an email about it periodically down here and
  • 02:55 you can set the email activity to be once an hour or daily or
  • 02:59 every few minutes or as soon as as possible, so
  • 03:02 that you can control the amount of traffic you can get from email notifications.
  • 03:06 Or you can simply say,
  • 03:07 just show me a banner that shows up whenever I get a mention in a banner.
  • 03:12 You'll see as a pop up at the bottom of your screen.
  • 03:15 Let me demonstrate that for you.
  • 03:17 So here we are on Meghan's desktop and she's working away
  • 03:20 when she receives a notification that she's been mentioned in Teams by Enrico.
  • 03:27 She can click on this to launch into Teams to see the mention.
  • 03:32 And in this way, she'll stay up to date with all the activity that relates to
  • 03:36 her personally, as well as for her team.
  • 03:41 So you may want to tweak these settings to suit your personal work style so
  • 03:44 that you can receive just the right amount of notifications and alerts and
  • 03:48 email from your Team activity.
  • 03:50 Another way you can personalize your settings is in calls.
  • 03:54 If you're going to be out of the office, you can forward your calls to voicemail
  • 03:58 and you can configure your voicemail including leaving a personalized greeting.
  • 04:02 If I click on Recorded message, it will take me to my voicemail.
  • 04:06 >> Main menu.
  • 04:08 To listen to your voice messages, press 1.
  • 04:11 To change your personal greeting, press 2.
  • 04:16 To play and record your personal greeting, press 1.
  • 04:19 You have not recorded a personal greeting.
  • 04:23 To record your greeting, press 1.
  • 04:25 Please record your greeting after the tone.
  • 04:29 When you have finished recording, press the # key.
  • 04:32 >> Hey, this is Brett.
  • 04:33 I'm out of the office right now but I'll get back to you.
  • 04:35 Please leave a message.
  • 04:36 >> To accept press 1, recording accepted.
  • 04:41 >> And finally, of course, you can change the ringtone,
  • 04:45 which is always a ton of fun.
  • 04:48 Make it work just for you.
  • 04:50 And so that's how you can configure Teams to suit your personalized style and
  • 04:53 the amount of notifications that you want.
  • 04:55 We'll be covering some other functions like this as we get into the individual
  • 04:58 features.
  • 05:00 Coming up next is joining a Team.

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