Meeting Reactions Arrive in Teams in January

Back in July, Microsoft announced a slew of features that would be coming to the Teams meeting experience. While some of the functionality, like Together Mode, has arrived, there are other features that are still outstanding.

One of those features is “reactions” in Meetings and Microsoft is now saying that this feature will start to roll out in late January and will complete by the end of February. Once rolled out, you will be able to select from four different reaction types – like, heart, applause, and laugh – and send it to meeting attendees from the new reactions and raise hand flyout in the control bar.

Once rolled out, this feature will be enabled by default for meetings but you will be able to turn it off using the AllowMeetingReactions policy. If you do have the feature turned off by default, they can still enable reactions in their meetings if they are the meeting organizer from the meeting option page.

Reactions are not going to revolutionize your next meeting but in the same way that you can respond to Teams’ messages with reactions, meeting reactions will make it easier to engage with the meeting speaker but not interrupting them.

Reactions in Teams is another checkbox for a feature that the tool offers to help make meetings marginally more tolerable for both the presenter and the listener. It also adds one more item to the checklist of making Teams a more robust tool that is harder to replicate as the company adds features to the communication platform seemingly every week.