We share many different types of content during Teams meetings, for example, offer documents, Excel with budget data, system architecture, or a diagram with the financial flow. Many documents contain sensitive or even highly confidential information. To protect such data you can use a brand-new feature introduced in the Teams Premium license – Watermarks.
In this post, I will show you how to enable Watermarks and how to use them in a meeting.
Watermarks
Watermarks are a great way to add an additional layer to protect your information. You can find them in videos, digital documents, and printed files. It can be a username, tag name, or any other word or phrase.
Teams Premium introduced watermarks for shared content during a meeting. It is visible to all attendees and can’t be disabled by them. A watermark is always an attendee e-mail address. For example, if a John (with e-mail address john@contoso.com) joins a meeting with watermarks, he can watch the presentation but it will be overlayed with the john@contoso.com email. It doesn’t hide content, but it helps identify who shared that information.
It also doesn’t block John from taking screenshots or recording using 3rd party applications, but it makes it harder to copy data from meetings and share it with someone else.
Technical information
When you enable watermarks every user in a meeting will see their email address on shared content and other participants’ video streams. It can be enabled by a meeting organizer or enforced by a template.
Watermarks are fully supported on a desktop and a mobile client. If an attendee joins a meeting using an unsupported client (e.g., web client), all shared content will be disabled, and the attendee will get audio-only experience.
Audio-only experience is enabled for:
- Participants using the Teams web client
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) participants
- Anonymous participants
- Overflow participants
When you enable watermarks for a meeting following features will be disabled:
- Meeting recording, including automatic recording
- Large gallery
- Together mode
- PowerPoint Live
- Whiteboard
- Content from camera
Important
- Attendees do not need a Teams Premium license, but organizers do need it.
- Watermarks can’t be disabled by attendees.
- It must be enabled in a meeting setting before the meeting starts (you can’t enable it in a running meeting).
- When you enable Watermarks you lose the Recording option!
Licenses
There is only 1 requirement for Watermarks – the Teams Premium license. You can enable a 30-day trial license and test it. You can find the detailed instruction in my previous post – Overview of the Teams Premium features.
How to configure Watermarks
- Navigate to Teams Admin Center (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/), open the Meetings section, and click on Meeting policies
- Open Global (Org-wide default) policy. You can also create a test one if you want to.
- Scroll down to the Watermark section and enable both Watermark videos and/or Watermark shared content.
- Confirm changes with the Save button
How to use watermarks
Watermarks must be enabled before you start a meeting. If you forget about it, you won’t be able to do this during the meeting!
- Create a meeting and go to the meeting settings
- Enable Watermarks for shared content and video feed. When you enable watermarks. Look at Record automatically setting – it is grayed out and you can use it!
To test it join the meeting and share content. You will see your e-mail address on the entire shared content.
If you join the meeting from an unsupported client (e.g., web) you will get an audio-only experience and additional notification.
Summary
Watermarks enable a new way to protect shared content. You can easily enable it for an important meeting and all content will be marked. If someone takes a screenshot or records it and shares it further, it can be easily identified.
To be sure that organizers won’t forget to enable watermarks before the meeting you can prepare a meeting template.
Keep in mind that a Teams Premium license is needed only for a meeting organizer so you can use the feature with external people as well (partners, guests, vendors, etc.). If you invite an anonymous user to the meeting, an audio-only mode will be enabled for that attendee.
