Love for the Stream Deck: Microsoft Teams

I was on the fence about getting a Stream Deck for a while, and when I finally jumped on it I immediately found it worth it for a single application interface - Microsoft Teams... No more searching for the right button at the opportune moment (mute? hang up? thumbs up! ugh I just raised by hand) - the setup was quick and simple.

---

What is a Stream Deck?

A pricy piece of kit for your desk that adds a bunch of extra buttons off of your keyboard with explicit uses - you decide what they do. The smallest (Neo) Stream Deck still runs about $100 but you can also find Stream Decks of multiple generations pre-loved from places like eBay.

https://www.elgato.com/stream-deck

The Stream Deck is clutch for anything you do on your computer that takes multiple clicks to get done or requires precise motions.

Microsoft Teams integration

I use Microsoft Teams a lot (too much!) at work (PM at Microsoft, disclosure reminder) - over half my day gets consumed by meetings if I’m not careful. The Stream Deck plugin for Microsoft Teams (https://marketplace.elgato.com/product/microsoft-teams-da5e2bbc-197c-4afe-8a85-a9941bf52697) was the first plugin I installed when setting up the deck and it was way easier than I expected.

The key step in my environment was to enable integrations (APIs) under the Privacy tab in the Teams settings (cmd + comma, thankfully). As long as you’ve toggled on the “enable API” option under “Third-party app API” for Teams, then your Stream Deck can quickly control your in-call options.

Is it worth it?

To be honest, for the volume of calls I’m on, the Stream Deck has been worth it for just the Teams integration alone. That doesn’t say great things about the Microsoft Teams interface (gosh did I just raise my hand when trying to thumbs up again?) but to be fair there’s some paradigm complications when you need to layer the call window in with all the other interfaces on the machine. I really don’t like the small pop-up window that appears when the call window isn’t visible for a moment and prefer the tactility of the external buttons.