Gallery View

Previous versions of Lync leveraged active-speaker video switching, which meant that users would see a video stream only for the current speaker, and Lync would dynamically switch the video feed to another user when it detected that someone else was speaking. This meant that all users received the exact same video stream from the A/V MCU and there was no control over the layout or appearance. The user who was currently speaking would continue to receive the video stream for the user previously considered active.

Lync 2013 has introduced the new Gallery View option, shown in Figure 2.1, which displays up to five concurrent video streams while in a conference. These streams are displayed in a single-row, side-by-side horizontal orientation within the conference window. Since some meetings will exceed five participants, Lync displays the photo for each additional user in a row below the gallery video streams. Similar to active-speaker switching, users will move in and out of the five video streams as they speak. A user can also “pin” another user’s video stream to his gallery so that the pinned user’s video stream will always be visible to him. If a user is not providing a video stream, a static photo is displayed in its place.

Figure 2.1. Gallery View.

Active-speaker switching hasn’t been removed from the product, but Gallery View is instead a new option available to administrators and users. While in a conference, users can actually use the new Gallery View, or switch back to the traditional active-speaker switching mode, which Lync calls Speaker View. These changes are unique to each user so there can be a mix of users within the conference using both Gallery View and active-speaker switching.

Each user has a level of control and flexibility over the layout in addition to the type of video stream. In addition to switching between Gallery View and Speaker View, a conference participant can enable Presentation View to hide all video streams and view only the current shared content. This can be useful on small portable screens since the video streams have been moved into the same window as shared content instead of the old side-by-side view. The last option available to users is the Compact View, which simply displays the static photo tiles of each participant along with the meeting content.

The addition of Gallery View natively within the product is a huge advantage to organizations because this was a feature previously provided only by third-party partner MCU solutions.