M365 Changelog: Meeting Reactions in Teams Meetings

MC230680 – Updated May 27, 2021: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

The Meeting Reactions feature allows users to react to participants during a meeting. Reactions will be available on Teams Desktop and Teams Mobile apps.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap IDs 65946 and 68905.

When this will happen

• Production and GCC environments: will start rolling out in early February (previously late January) and will be complete by mid-February (previously early February). Complete
• GCC-High tenants: start rolling out early June (previously end of May) and will be complete by the end of June (previously mid-June)
• DOD tenants: start rolling out in Q3 calendar year 2021 (Mircosoft will provide an additional update in the future).

How this will affect your organization

In a Teams meeting, participants can choose 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.

Meeting participants will see the reaction displayed over their position.

When content is shared, the reactions will float over the content. This applies to Desktop, Window, PowerPoint, and Whiteboard sharing. 

What you need to do to prepareMeeting reactions will be on by default and you should consider how to deploy in your tenant.

You can change whether users have reactions on or off by default by using the AllowMeetingReactions policy. If you turn reactions off by default for users, they can still enable reactions in their meetings if they are the meeting organizer from the meeting option page.

You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.

Support for meetings on web, room systems, or surface hub will follow later in the year.

Learn more: Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy.