MS Teams on the known, or less known: Help me decide

Hardware
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Hello all,

I have a bit of a challenging two-hour Teams meeting/interview coming up tomorrow, that will see me fielding questions and potentially have to refer to a variety of digital sources.

I’m very used to working with Teams on the Mac. Usually have it off to the left on my MBP - since I use the built-in webcam on the laptop for video. Have two other external monitors, with a 24" centrally placed, and a 22" to the right of that.

I really don’t want to have to stand off time/energy to managing the behaviour of Teams if I can avoid it.
The biggest annoyance currently, is that when anything is seemingly done in Teams on the laptop screen (like clicking into the Chat function), it jumps from the laptop over to my centre screen automatically.
I don’t know how to prevent this, or why it does it, but it is a pain since it then obscures what I might have been referring to, and I have to move it back without losing a beat.

Question:

Would it be beneficial to rather initiate the Teams call from my 2020 iPad Pro? I’m thinking that this way, there is only “one” screen, and I can have the iPad placed in the middle, below my main 24" - which means I still have complete access to all three Mac screens (MBP, 24" and 22"). Furthermore, in my head, I think turning on DND on the iPad will minimise the chance of notification interruption?

Using a USB-C dongle, I can still power the iPad, and connect my USB earphones&mic, so communication will be fine.

The downside, it that I would need to be focused on the camera off on the side, since the iPad would be in landscape mode.
And, sigh, I’m running the iOS 14 Beta. It has been rock solid for me, and I have tried a few calls already using the iPad, which worked as expected. But still…

Any thoughts/suggestions on this? Could it be so much better as to being worth it - or should I simply stick it out on the Mac, in the environment I am far more familiar with?

2

You can switch on DND on your Mac too.
If it’s a video call I’d stick to the Mac because you’ll always be looking at the camera whereas with the iPad your eyes will be all over the place if you’re referring to the Mac screen

1 Like
3

Any suggestions on keeping Teams on the laptop screen, and not jumping over to my main one?

4

Maybe set Display preferences to “Mirror” at least during the course of the interview?

5

So then all three mirror what is focused, i.e Teams? If that’s what would happen — I would then presumably not be able to view other documents on the different monitors? If so, that would not be ideal.

I dug around in Teams’ settings — there doesn’t appear to be a preferences pane – and couldn’t find anything there that looks like it manages this. Really silly behaviour — but will do some googling to see if others have managed to solve it.

Regardless, will probably stick to doing the meeting on the Mac. Rather the devil I know and all that…