Watermarking your Teams Meeting

Watermarking is a Teams Premium feature intended to be used as a deterrent to stop attendees taking and sharing screenshot of meetings and people in the meeting by overlaying their email address onto the incoming video and shared content.  This does not block screenshots, but ensures that if screenshots are shared then the source can be easily traced.  This is especially useful when using a Teams meeting to share sensitive content or in situations where attendees images should not be shared, such as in education settings.

When watermarks are enabled for either shared content or video feeds the meeting can not be recorded.  It appears logical to assume that this is due to challenges determining what watermark should appear on the recording.  It will be interesting to see where Microsoft go with this challenge, as I can easily see a situation where you will need both recordings and watermarks.

This is not the only restriction on meeting functionality which comes about from enabling the watermark feature. 

When applying a watermark to everyone’s video feed the following features are not available:

• Meeting recording
• Together mode
• Large gallery view

When applying a watermark to shared content the following features are not available:

• Meeting recording
• Together mode
• Large gallery view
• PowerPoint Live
• Whiteboard
• Shared Content from cameras

One final limitation is that when users join from a scenario which does not support displaying watermarks (such as web, Skype for Business users, VDI, where participant is anonymous or when meeting attendees are in streaming only mode) they will have an audio only experience.  In the web experience a message is displayed for the user.

To use watermarking, enable the option in Meeting Options before the meeting starts, the setting can be applied during a meeting but seems to only be applied as people join.  Note that recording options are now greyed out.

Once others join the meeting they will see the watermark overlayed on content being shared and others video feeds but not their own.  A user sharing their screen will not see the watermark over the content they are sharing.  So to test this I need to join from two devices and hence I’m looking in two directions at once in the image below which is taken from the user not sharing the content.

Also note the message displayed at the top of the screen, letting them know the watermark feature is being applied.

Licensing: Only the meeting organiser needs the Teams Premium licence applied for the watermark feature to be applied to the meeting.