everyone hates it from what I hear. except for the entity paying the rent. if that’s what helps formalize and make permanent flexible work, then that’s what it will take. or drastically smaller personal work areas if you “refuse to share space.”
I don’t have a laptop. Don’t need one. (though it would be nice for work)
My iMac is sufficient for my computing needs.
I believe there is. Not sure you can use your background, but I think you can use a company-approved one.
We use a company-designed background for Zoom, if I could find where it’s stored I suppose I could use it for Teams but not going to bother to try.
I have a fake background on teams and a different fake background on zoom. if I could find where they hide those then they must not be too hidden.
I use a mini mac with an external monitor as a laptop. Not sure if that’s weird
i actually prefer hoteling. Better than being stuck to an annoying person everyday
That setting sorta exists in at least some versions of Teams. I forget the Microsoftese of the prompts, but if you right-click on your image while in a Teams meeting, there’s an option to hide your own video (at least on my version of Teams).
Strictly speaking, it doesn’t completely hide the video…it just puts it down at the bottom of the Teams application window, almost-but-not-quite out of pane.
I haven’t tried the right-click-and-hide tactic on other people’s images. I may have to do that in some future meeting, just to see what happens.
You can use your own background, although I don’t remember off the top of my head how to do it.
In my department’s weekly coffee breaks on Teams, we will sometimes have themes for our background images, like “where do I want to be on vacation”.
Personally, I hate the result when Teams or Zoom try to edit out your actual background when you don’t have a green screen. So about five minutes before a meeting when I know I can’t go cameraless, I end up testing my video and making sure the visible space isn’t too unpresentable.
Zoom corrected their green screen issue sometime last year
Curiously, my company went the other direction. For a while at the start of the pandemic, we were forbidden from using Zoom on our work computers because of security concerns. I think that lasted until someone in the C-suite got tired of having to find alternate ways to connect to Zoom invites.
Of course, my company has gone all-in with Microsoft. The data security folks have apparently become comfortable enough with the security issues that we’re using OneDrive when we need to share large files outside the company. Presumably that’s because there’s some mechanism in place to let data security monitor what’s being shared with whom – I’ve certainly been challenged on a few files so-transferred.
I can upload whatever images I want to use as backgrounds in Teams, in addition to a couple dozen standard ones. (The standard ones include both stuff that presumably came from Microsoft, like a Minecraft background, and stuff that obviously came from my employer, like scenes from inside some of our offices, and company logos.)
I find the non-green-screen artifacts less obvious when I blur the real background that when I use a fake one, but we’ve recently had a push for “fun” backgrounds, so I’ve been using photos I took.
And thanks to this thread, I found an option to hide my image. I haven’t tried it, yet, but I probably will soon.
I don’t know if we were forbidden from using Zoom, but it wasn’t something we could initiate. I certainly have heard more people complain about security issues with Zoom than with Teams, though. But Zoom has improved a lot. For instance, it no longer lets you remotely turn on someone else’s microphone.
Kinda what I have here. Except cheapo Windoze machine.
Not really a laptop, though. Not very mobile.