Working with a team? Time and punctuality is a watchword to help keep your business ahead of competitors. Today, I’ll be sharing with you how to schedule meetings on Microsoft Teams. The Microsoft Teams is a one-stop business solution that aids communication and collaboration. This platform owned by the tech giant Microsoft has proven to enhance teamwork, enriched collaboration, and communication. The software houses the functionality to chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration in its workplace. The service integrates with the Office 365 subscription office productivity suite and also has extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products.
So if you have this software at hand, scheduling meetings on it would go a long way in keeping you connected to the team. Having webinars, business meetings, briefing? Microsoft Teams makes it easy to set up these meetings. Need to meet with your entire group or one-on-one? Here’s a guide on how to set up, customize, and hold a Microsoft Teams meeting.
How do You Set up a Meeting?
Meetings on Microsoft Teams can either be set up through the MS Teams App or Outlook. These meetings would still show the same way within the system. Therefore you can start the process in whichever application makes feels more comfortable to you.
Setting up on Microsoft Teams
The “Meet Now” button in the Microsoft Teams app, is absolutely the quickest way to get all of the people in a channel talking ASAP. To do this, you need to select the little camera icon in a new or existing conversation. Your video preview should start. In this video preview, enter a name for your meeting, and click the “Meet Now”.
Next, click on the names of the people you would want to invite to the meeting. You can also add phone numbers of people who are not part of the chat to join the discussion.
If you want to join a meeting created by another user, look for the camera icon in the conversation and click “Jump In”.
You can easily share your screen during a meeting. To do this, click the screen icon to show your screen to the other people you’re talking to. The ellipses icon (three dots) will give you other in-meeting controls, including the option to record the meeting and have it emailed to you.
How to Create a Channel Meeting
To create a channel meeting, click on “New Meeting” and type the name of one or more channels into the input field with “Add Channel”. You can’t add or remove a channel once invites are sent out. You would need to restart the process of sending new invites if you need to include extra channels.
Setting up on Outlook for Microsoft Teams
To start a meeting from Microsoft Outlook, after opening the app switch to the calendar view. Click “New Teams Meeting” at the view’s top.
Add your invitees within the “To” field. You can also invite an entire contact group – that is your distribution lists. Add your meeting subject, location, start time (use your current time as start time), and end time. Then click Send.
You can equally invite people from outside your organization using Outlook. Just be sure to add them as guests before the meeting starts else they would join the meeting anonymously.
How to Schedule a Microsoft Teams Meeting
The steps to scheduling a meeting on Microsoft Teams is different from starting a meeting. On Microsoft Teams, meetings are scheduled using the exchange calendar. Your Calendar in Teams Automatically synchronizes with your exchange calendar. Every meeting scheduled with MS Teams automatically becomes an online meeting. Simply follow the steps below to schedule a meeting:
- From the Microsoft Teams software, click on the “Calendar” tab on the left side menu and select “New Meeting.”
- Select your preferred time range from within the calendar and Teams will open a scheduling form, where you can give your meeting a title, invite people, and add meeting details.
- Select how often you would want the meeting to recur in case you need a follow-up.
- Once you’re done with those, click save.
- The scheduling form would close and instantly send invites to participants.
Note: you can use the “Scheduling Assistant” to pick a time during which everyone would be available.
How to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting from Outlook:
- Go to the “Meeting” tab of Microsoft Outlook and select “New Teams Meeting.”
- Add everyone you would want to be part of the meeting through the input field labeled “To”.
- You can invite an entire contact group. If you want all members of the group to join the meeting at once.
- Add your meeting subject, meeting’s location, it’s start and end time, then click Send to send invites to your team.
- You can also invite people who are not part of your organization to a Teams Meeting from Outlook. To do this, you’ll need to invite them as guests before the meeting starts, so they don’t need to join anonymously.
- To add guests to your team, start by selecting “Teams” then visiting the team on your list. Click on the ellipses(… or More Options) and select“Add member”.
- Enter the email address of the guest. They would require a business or consumer account can join your team as a guest.
- You can also edit guests’ information to give them a name.
- Click Add to send a welcome email to your guest.
Please take note that for you to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting from Outlook, you need to first install the add-In for Microsoft Office.