Automatically silence app notifications/"Focus Assist"/Do Not Disturb while in Zoom meetings?

[ajkessel]

Audible notifications are a major and persistent distraction in Zoom meetings (and sometimes an embarassment, when it becomes obvious people are IMing with each other behind the scenes), whether they come from Outlook, Slack, Teams, or another app. There does not appear to be any feature in Zoom to silent external app notifications when a meeting is active. The user can manually disable sounds, turn on Focus Assist on Windows, or Do Not Disturb/Focus mode on OSX, but most users will never remember to do this.

Is there any way to make this happen automatically? Does anyone know if Windows Focus Assist (and the Mac equivalent) have APIs that Zoom could call to mute local sounds during meetings? Is there any third-party software that might accomplish this goal?

There does appear to be at least an undocumented API to Focus Assist, mentioned at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55477041/toggling-focus-assist-mode-in-win-10-programmatically

[markuja]

It seems that Zoom disables Windows notifications globally when the screen is shared during a Zoom meeting. However, triggering Focus Assist would be better: The new Teams app does not use Windows notifications, but proprietary badges that will be muted only by Focus Assist. 

[Rosselhoff]

Yes, quite frustrating. I can confirm that a Focus session, or manually turning on DND in Windows does NOT silence MS Teams, at least "new" Teams (which I prefer).
Yes, it would be great if Zoom could interact with Windows Focus/DND mode...
But, we also need Microsoft to update Focus/DND mode to truly silence everything and it does not.

[markuja]

New Teams actually can be muted if global DND is activated. There is a setting for this right on top of the notification settings in New Teams.

The problem is, that Zoom does not activate DND if the screen is shared. Zoom only disables notifications globally, which in turn does not mute New Teams 😉