Teams – You can manage Teams Meeting backgrounds

As you know Teams has been allowing end-users to either blur or set a custom background for their meeting.

Well, now Teams Administrators can now manage this settings to define which option is available to end-users.

The options available for administrators are:

• No Filters; meaning no option to blur or set custom background
• All Filters; meaning end-users can do what they want, including using their own custom background (while there is not yet an option from the Teams client, there is a trick see https://t.co/0F7Stk8avz)
• BlurOnly; this will disable the custom background option
• BlurAndDefaultBackgrounds; which allow the blur option and set a default background with no way for end-user to change it

These settings can not be managed from the Teams administration portal (from now?) and requires you to use the Skype for Business Online PowerShell modules (yes, Skype for Business modules) – available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39366

To manage it, you need to update your Teams Meeting policy/policies using the below command; first to connect to your tenant and then set the policy settings for the end-user as the VideoFiltersMode parameter can not be changed at the policy level

Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
$Cred = Get-Credential
$CSSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $Cred
Import-PSSession -Session $CSSession –AllowClobber

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy –Identity <Teams user email address> –PolicyName <any of the option ‘BlurAndDefaultBackgrounds’, ‘BlurOnly’, ‘AllFilters’ or ‘NoFilters’