Create and manage meetings customization policies

  • 8 minutes

Microsoft Teams Premium includes the ability to create meeting customization policies. 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, tenant admins 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).

Some organizations have multiple business units under different brand identities within the same tenant. In these cases, admins 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.

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, non-licensed users

  • Guest of Tenant users

  • External Users

  • Anonymous users

Where are meeting themes visible

Supported Microsoft Teams 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

Create a meeting customization policy

Tenant admins can set up and manage meeting themes for Teams meetings in the Teams admin center. To create meeting themes, admins will first need to create a new meeting customization policy or modify their existing policy.

To enable the custom background policy, admins will 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

Meeting themes contain the following assets for your theme:

  • Logo: Teams Meetings can be customized with square logos that must meet Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1) and adhere to the following parameters:

    • PNG and JPEG image formats for their logo.

    • A logo image with a maximum size of 5 MB.

    • Logo images with a minimum dimension of 576 px X 576 px.

    • Only one image per theme from their device.

  • Custom image: Teams meetings can be customized with images that decorate the meetings screen and provide a colorful backdrop to your meetings. Custom images must meet Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1) and adhere to the following parameters:

    • PNG and JPEG image formats for brand image

    • Image max size of 5 MB

    • Image with following minimum and maximum dimensions:

      • Minimum dimensions: 360 px X 360 px

      • Maximum dimensions: 2048 px X 2048 px

  • Custom color: Teams meetings can be customized with the organization's primary or secondary color in the meeting experience. You can enter the hex code value of your organization's color, which will appear on key surfaces of the meeting experience.

    Note

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

Assign a meeting customization policy to users

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

  • By default, all licensed users will get the Global Default policy assigned to them.

  • Created meeting customization policies will override the global default

  • A licensed user can only be assigned one customization policy

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 won'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'll continue to see the default Teams meeting experience.

  • IT Admin Controls – IT Admins can prevent users with accessibility concerns from seeing the branding by:

    • Policy control – ensuring they're not added to a customization policy. This control will prevent them from creating branding-enabled meetings.

    • Meeting Options – meeting organizers can turn off branding for a meeting if a user with accessibility concerns will be joining the meeting.