One of the main features of Teams is online meetings. In fact, many people first got to know Teams by receiving an invitation link to a Teams meeting. With these guidelines, you can organise a Teams meeting yourself and maybe learn something new about the role of a meeting participant!

Online meetings

Team online meetings can be organised between teams, between two people, or even with people completely outside the organisation. Outsiders can participate even if they do not have Teams in their organisation. In this case, the invitation can be sent to any email and the participant can join by clicking on the invitation link that comes with the email.

For online meetings, it is strongly recommended to install the Teams desktop application to take advantage of all the features of Teams and to ensure the proper functioning of the service. Of course, you can also participate in a web meeting via the Teams browser application, but you cannot be sure that the microphone, camera, screen sharing, etc. will work as expected. Install Teams on your computer from the Windows Software Center, the Managed Software Center for Mac, or download Teams from the Windows website.

1. Organising the online meeting

There are several ways to organise a meeting. Here are three examples that are perhaps the most popular.

A. Organizing from the Teams "Calendar" page:

Go to Teams and navigate from the left sidebar to the "Calendar" page. There you will find the buttons to organise your meeting.

If you want to set up a meeting immediately, click on the "Meet now" button at the top right of the page.

If you are scheduling and calling a meeting later, press "New meeting".

From the New meeting page, you can fill in all the information needed to organise a meeting. At a minimum, the title, participants and schedule must be filled in. Other fields can be filled in as required.

The "Scheduling Assistant" tab is a great tool to help you schedule your meeting. There you can see the free-busy details of the participants as "swimming pools" and choose the right empty interval for everyone. Remember that the free-busy data in the electronic calendar does not automatically mean a suitable interval for everyone, but wait for the meeting invitation to be approved!

Once you've found a good time that matches other participants' calendars, click on the time on the board to select it!

B. Organizing from the Outlook Calendar page:

Go to Outlook and go to the Calendar page, which can be found in Outlook Desktop and Outlook Web Browser as an icon in the bottom left corner.

To start organising a meeting, click on "New appointment" or "New meeting" in the top bar. Add participants, schedule and other necessary information. You can create a Teams meeting from the meeting invitation by ticking the "Teams-meeting" box. A Teams invitation link will be generated in the meeting invitation after sending the invitation.

Also in Outlook, when sending a meeting invitation, you can schedule the meeting based on the free-busy information in the calendar of the other participants. To schedule, click on the "Scheduling" button in the top bar.

C. Organising from a Microsoft Teams team page or a specific channel:

You can also organise a meeting directly from the team page or from a specific channel. This option is particularly useful if the meeting participants are the same group of people on the same Teams team. On the channels, you can further segment the participants and organise a meeting related to a specific channel topic.

To start organising a meeting using this method, select your team or channel and the video camera icon at the top right of the page. You can then choose to start the meeting immediately, or schedule it for a later time.

By selecting the scheduling of the meeting, Teams redirects to the same page that was mentioned for option A. This time, the "Channel" selection will default to the team and channel from which you started the meeting. Finally, press "Send" and the meeting invitation will be saved to the Team channel and participants will be notified of the new meeting invitation.

 

Read next: How do i join a Teams meeting?