Teams has a mute button all of its own in taskbar of latest Windows 11 preview build

Another way to make sure the yawns don't get through

Microsoft has added a mute button for Teams into the taskbar of the latest Windows 11 preview build.

This should prove very handy for when one lets loose with the expletives due to the collaboration platform behaving poorly.

The feature has turned up in build 22494 and pops a microphone icon into the taskbar when the user joins a meeting, assuming one is a member of the subset of Windows Insiders lucky enough to have the feature switched on, and also have the work or school version of Microsoft Teams installed.

Other versions, such as Microsoft Teams for home, are not yet supported. The mute button will, however, eventually reach all Windows 11 users, we understand.

Microsoft said that "other communications applications can also add this capability to their applications," although rival vendors were less than impressed with the emphasis on Teams.

Element COO Amandine Le Pape told The Register: "It looks like it's more about muting the competition."

We asked Microsoft how the functionality could be extended to other platforms, but have yet to receive a response. Heaven forbid that the company might be, as Le Pape put it, "gatekeeping its technology [in] a blatant attempt to push its own platform ahead of others."

Frankly, if it's muting you're after, a variety of tools already exist to do just that, not least PowerToys (also from Microsoft) which will helpfully toggle video and/or microphone input regardless of application via a single keystroke.

Other new features in the Windows build include showing snap groups in ALT+TAB and Task View for some Insiders as well as a fix for the indexer hogging CPU and RAM when its database became too fragmented. ®