For the knowledge sharing sessions I help organise, we are using Microsoft Teams to allow colleagues to join online. These series are set up as Teams-meetings from Microsoft Teams itself, in a channel of the relevant Team. In this article, let us look at 7 things that struck me when we started with this approach.
1.Meeting series? Meet in a separate channel
In our Microsoft Teams where we host the knowledge sessions, we also share other information. To avoid a messy tangle between the knowledge sessions and the rest, we created a channel called ‘Webinars’ to host the online meetings and to store the associated chat.
We schedule the Teams-meeting from the Teams agenda as a series of recurring events, and select the channel where we want to meet.
Scheduling a new teams-meeting from the agenda in Teams: invite the Webinars channel of my Team.
2.Lost the meeting title and channel selection? Scroll up!
When I was setting up an invitation with a long description of the webinar agenda, I thought I had lost the meeting title and the option to select the channel where I wanted to host the meeting. As it turned out, I had scrolled down to reach the end of the description. And scrolling down, I had lost the top of meeting meeting form. Unfortunately, that was not very clear: you only see the scroll bar when you put your cursor on the right hand side of the window. So if you have lost some detail fields in your meeting form, check if you have to scroll up!
You may need to scroll up to see the fields displayed at the top of the meeting form
3.All Team members are automatically invited. But other can participate too
Everybody who is in the Team is automatically welcome in the Teams-meeting hosted in that Team. So we don’t have to worry that we forget to include someone in the invitations.
But people who are not a member of the Team can attend the meeting as well, if they get the link to participate. So if a team member forwards the invitation to someone else or if you publish the link on Yammer for instance, others can participate as well. I had not expected that: I thought a meeting organised inside a Team would only be accessible to people in that Team. But so far the link is working for non-Team members as well.
4.The meeting chat becomes a conversion thread: ongoing for recurring meetings
In our knowledge sessions, the chat in the Teams-meeting plays an important role, because not all participants can talk via their microphone. These chat messages can be consulted afterwards in the Team-channel: they are displayed as reactions in the conversion thread of the meeting.
For a recurring meeting, you have one ongoing conversion thread. The latest 15 posts are displayed, the rest is collapsed and need to be expanded (in batches).
5.The invitation does not always appear in everyone’s agenda. But there is a button
Unfortunately, we see that the invitation set up in Teams does not always become visible in Outlook for all members invited: some people do not get the invitation in their email and it does not show up in their Outlook agenda either, Not nice, because most people work from their Outlook calendars.
We have seen this happen for new Team members, who have joined the Team after the invitation has been sent. But recently we also saw this for colleagues who had been added to the Team beforehand. Or rather: they did not see anything appear in their Outlook.
Fortunately, if you do not see the invitation in your Outlook, you can add it to your agenda yourself. Open the invitation in Teams, from the channel itself. If the meeting is not in our Outlook calendar yet, you see a button Add to your calendar. If the event is already included in your Outlook calendar, this button is not visible.
Add the meeting to your calendar in Outlook
6.You can specify who has to wait in the lobby and who can present
At least, up to a point. Once you have scheduled the meeting, you can edit it to tweak the meeting options. Note: I have not found a button for the meeting options in the form where you enter the details of the new meeting, so save it first and then edit to set the meeting options.
In a scheduled Teams-meeting, you can edit the meeting options.
In the meeting options, you can determine who can bypass the lobby. By default people in my organisation can join the meeting directly, without waiting in the lobby. If often people from outside your organisation join and you are tired of admitting them from the lobby, you can set this option to ‘People from my organisation and trusted organisations’ or even ‘Everyone’.
You can also determine who can present, as opposed to attending only without permission to present a desktop for example. The standard option is that everyone can present, including people outside your organisation. You can limit this to only people inside your organisation or only yourself.
You cannot make specific people, other than yourself, presenters yet. At least, not directly. If you invite individual colleagues, you can specify who is a presenter and who is only an attendee. However, that does not work if you invite everybody implicitly, as a member of the Team. So if you want selected presenters, you need to invite these people as individuals. See also the Roles in a Teams meeting.
The meeting options of a Teams-meeting
7.Room invitations may get lost when you edit the meeting series
So now everything was arranged nicely for the online participants of our sessions, but we hit a snag in our arrangements for the on-site participants. We had booked a meeting room at headquarters, by inviting it in Outlook and verifying that the request had been accepted. But when we modified the first occurrence in the ‘save the date’ meeting series, to specify the topic of that meeting, we found that we had lost the meeting room after we updated it. Because we caught this issue in time, we could re-invite the meeting room fortunately, but it is still annoying. I am not sure where this is coming from, but I am sure that I will doublecheck the room bookings for these Teams channel meetings!
