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Meeting themes for Teams meetings

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Microsoft Teams

Information icon Some features described in this article require Teams Premium

Overview

Meeting themes consist of your organization’s brand colors, a custom image to represent your org, and your org’s logo. Applying a custom theme allows you, as an admin, to customize the visual appearance of the pre-join and lobby screens for your users' meetings.

Customization in Teams meetings allows organizations to extend their visual identities across the meeting experience. An organization’s images and colors help foster internal corporate culture building and increase overall brand awareness with guests. With the help of an organization's brand management and corporate communications teams, you can easily set up and create meeting themes for various business units and departments within a single tenant.

By default, Teams premium licensed users who have been assigned a meeting customization policy can create meeting themes-enabled meetings. These meetings feature themes by default, and anyone who joins the meetings can see the themes (including unlicensed internal users, guests, and anonymous users).

Note

Uploaded images and their associated image URL are visible to all meeting participants; including external users, guests, unauthenticated users, and anyone with a link to join the meeting. To stop displaying your images, you must delete the images from your meeting theme. To remove images from a meeting theme, navigate to the Meeting Customization Policy in the Teams Admin Center, select the chosen meeting theme, and select "Edit Meeting Theme”.

Prerequisites

Before setting up meeting themes in Teams Meetings, check to make sure you have the following items:

  • Access to Teams Premium SKU.
  • You’re an admin with access to the Teams admin center or you’ve been assigned a customization policy.
  • Your custom logo, image, and color meet the required specifications.

Set up and manage meeting themes

As an admin, you can set up and manage meeting themes for Teams meetings with the Teams admin center or PowerShell.

Using the Teams Admin Center

Create a customization policy

To create meeting themes, you need to create a new meeting customization policy or modify their existing policy. To enable the custom background policy, perform the following steps:

  1. Open the Teams admin center.
  2. Select Meetings from the navigation pane.
  3. Under Meetings, select Customization Policies
  4. Either select an existing policy or create a new one
  5. Within your chosen policy, navigate to the Custom Meeting Visuals section.
  6. Toggle the Currently Active setting from off to on to enable the setting.
  7. Select Save to enable meeting themes.

Note

Although you can access Custom Meeting Visuals from the Meeting Policies page, we recommend accessing it through Customization Policies to avoid navigation through global organization default policies.

Within the meeting customization policy, you can begin defining their branding by creating a meeting theme.

Meeting themes houses the following assets for your theme:

  • Logo - your organization's logo image.
  • Custom image - a brand image from your organization (custom images aren't the same as custom meeting backgrounds).
  • Custom color - it's recommended to use either your brand's primary or secondary color - whichever one best complements your brand image and logo.

To create a new theme, select Add meeting theme.

Add a custom logo image

Teams Meetings supports square logos that appear on key surfaces during your meeting, including the lobby screen. Logo images must meet Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1).

Uploads must adhere to the following parameters. An admin can only upload:

  • PNG and JPEG image formats for their logo.
  • A logo image with a maximum size of 5 MB.
  • A logo image with a minimum dimension of 576 px X 576 px.
  • Upload one image per theme from their device.

Add a custom image

Teams meetings support an organization's images that skin the meetings screen and provide a colorful backdrop to your meetings.

Note

These images aren't the same as custom meeting backgrounds

Custom images must meet Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1), and uploads must follow these parameters:

  • PNG and JPEG image formats for brand image.
  • Brand images with max size of 5 MB.
  • Brand images with following dimensions:
    • Minimum dimensions: 360 px X 360 px
    • Maximum dimensions: 2048 px X 2048 px
  • Upload a minimum of 0 and a maximum of one image per theme from their device.

Add a custom color

Teams meetings support an organization's primary or secondary color in the meeting experience. You can enter the hex code value of your organization's color, which displays on key surfaces of the meeting experience.

Note

To support Microsoft accessibility standards, the final color generated may not match your brand color.

Preview a meeting theme

Once you've added your meeting assets, you can preview how your theme will look before saving. Selecting Preview opens the preview dialog and shows the newly defined theme for both desktop and mobile.

Save meeting theme

By selecting Save, the meeting theme is automatically saved and applied to your meetings. Selecting Save and apply for later saves the meeting theme, but doesn't apply it to any of your meetings. To apply this theme, select Save on the meeting theme creator, or use the Currently active toggle on the meeting theme table on the customization policy page.

Using PowerShell

Note

To upload images, you must use Teams admin center.

You can manage meeting themes by using the following PowerShell cmdlets in Teams PowerShell:

This example assigns a meeting theme policy called “Policy Test” to a group named group@contoso.com.

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy -Group group@contoso.com -PolicyName "Policy Test" -Rank 1

This example assigns a meeting theme policy called “Policy Test” to a user named alice@contoso.com.

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy -identity " alice@contoso.com" -PolicyName "Policy Test"

Assigning a meeting customization policy to users

Meeting customization policies can be assigned to one, many, or a predefined user group in your Tenant. Make sure that these users have a Teams premium license to use these features.

  • By default, all licensed users get the Global Default policy assigned to them.
  • Custom Customization Policies override the global default.
  • A licensed user can only be assigned one customization policy.

Use cases for multiple departments or business units in one tenant

Some organizations have multiple business units under different brand identities within the same tenant. In these cases, you can create meeting customization policies that are dedicated to each brand. They can also assign a department or business unit user group to a specific policy.

Contoso Ltd. has a single Tenant in Microsoft Teams, containing the user profiles of all their employees across different business organizations. The company is looking to adopt custom branded meetings in Teams to increase their brand presence with their clients and encourage an internal corporate culture.

Contoso has two business units (BUs) under their organization: Contoso Technical Services and Contoso Education. Both BUs have their own distinct brand imagery, and want to display their branding during their internal and external meetings.

To support this use case, Tenant Admins can create two distinct customization policies:

  • Policy A - Contoso Technical Services – houses Contoso Technical Service’s brand logo, image, and color.
  • Policy B - Contoso Education – houses Contoso Education’s brand logo, image, and color.

They can proceed to assign the licensed employees in Contoso Technical Services to Policy A, and licensed employees of Contoso Education to Policy B.

Where are meeting themes visible

Note

Attendees joining Teams through the Web experience won't be able to see meeting themes.

Supported clients:

  • Desktop client
  • Android (Versions 11+ only)
  • iOS
Join Launcher Meeting Pre-Join Meeting Lobby Meeting Stage
Logo No Yes Yes No
Image No Yes Yes No
Color Yes Yes Yes Yes

Logos and images will be available for Join Launcher in future updates.

Note

The webinar registration page will still be used for configuring the webinar's branding for meeting registration and emails. The new webinar experience will use these theme features within meetings. Meeting organizers can turn off meeting themes for a webinar by opting-out in Meeting options. Learn more about the new webinar experience here.

Who can view a meeting theme

While only licensed users who are assigned a meeting customization policy can create meeting themes-enabled meetings, anyone can view the themes that are applied to a meeting. These users include:

  • In-tenant, Teams Premium licensed users
  • In-tenant, nonlicensed users
  • Guest of Tenant users
  • External Users
  • Anonymous users

How to turn off meeting themes for a meeting

Tenant Admins can allow meeting organizers to disable meeting themes for a specific meeting instance. Disabling meeting themes returns the meeting to the default Teams theme.

To give meeting organizers the ability to disable Meeting Themes:

  1. Navigate to the Meeting customization policy.
  2. Toggle the setting "Meeting Theme" that allows organizers to turn off the meeting theme for specific meetings.

Meeting organizers can turn off meeting themes by:

  1. Navigating to the Meeting options menu for a meeting instance.
  2. Toggling off the meeting option Allow organizers to turn off meeting theme.

Note

  • For recurring meetings or series, the meeting option will apply for every instance of the meeting.
  • Meeting themes won't be disabled for meetings that are in-progress. To apply changes, you must end the call and restart the meeting.

Best practices for meeting themes

  • Only use your organization's official image assets. Don't use image content that you don't own.
  • Work with your brand and marketing team to ensure that your image assets and colors together follow your organization's brand guidelines.
  • Ensure you're using high-quality logo images, which are visible on small and large screen devices.
  • Colors generated in the Teams App may differ from your brand colors. This process was created to ensure Microsoft Accessibility Standards are met.
  • Users with high-contrast device settings can't see meeting themes.

Accessibility

Here are a few points to ensure accessibility requirements are met:

  • Follow existing UI patterns and structure – The current structure and text on the screen aren’t being modified with this feature.
  • Image Contrast Ratio – Image assets are required to meet the 4:5:1 color contrast ratio.
  • Accessible Color Generation Support – We calculate the accessible color output that is the closest match to the brand color input while maintain Microsoft Accessibility standards.
  • High Contrast support – For users with high contrast settings enabled, branding doesn't apply. They continue to see the default Teams meeting experience.
  • IT Admin Controls – IT Admins can prevent users with accessibility concerns from seeing the branding through:
    • Policy control – ensuring they're not added to a customization policy. This control prevents them from creating branding-enabled meetings.
    • Meeting Options – meeting organizers can turn off branding for a meeting if a user with accessibility concerns joins their meeting.