Meetings. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re still a necessary part of office life, even in the modern workplace. However, the tools we use to host and attend meetings can have a big impact on the experience, both positive and negative. The meeting tool-of-choice in Office 365 today is Microsoft Teams – a fantastic tool to enhance the meeting experience in several ways. This post will cover the basic components of Microsoft Teams to organize and participate in a Teams meeting. If you’re a Microsoft Teams newbie, these features are a great place to start!
This is a joint post with a friend and co-worker of mine, Ali Fadavinia. Ali and I work together on a large team rolling out Office 365 capabilities, including Microsoft Teams, to an organization.
In the past, many of you have used Skype for Business (SfB) for meetings by including a virtual link to your Outlook meeting invitations. You can do the same with Microsoft Teams!
What actions should be taken to see “New Teams Meeting” in your Outlook ribbon? You will need to install the Teams Desktop client and, once installed, Outlook will automatically show the new icon on the ribbon.
As was done for SfB, this will add a Teams Meeting link at the bottom of your meeting invitation body so when the time comes, meeting attendees can join with the provided link:
Anyone with an email address and internet connection can access the call via the browser, simply by clicking the ‘Join on the web instead’ button:
All attendees in the meeting will be notified recording has started.
The recording will appear in conversation history for the organizer and all internal attendees.
Further details on how to record a meeting in Teams can be found here.
If you work in a busy or open cubicle environment, this is a useful feature for meeting and video calls. Sometimes you may have confidential information on your walls, you may be on your commute, or you may be working from home or a coffee shop with lots of visual distraction in the background. The background blur feature cleverly blurs the surroundings behind you while leaving you clear and un-blurred.
To activate Background Blur during meetings, click on the ellipsis “…”on the call menu and select “Blur my background”.