9 tips for meeting with Microsoft Teams
Published Feb 01 2018 02:56 PM 1.5M Views
Microsoft

As we bring Skype for Business capabilities into Microsoft Teams, we’ve recently released several new features which are rapidly enabling you to host and participate in more productive meetings, and invite anyone on the planet to join you. 

  • With Audio Conferencing, anonymous join, and meeting and calling support on Edge and Chrome, Teams has more options for attendees not in your organization to join Teams meetings. 
  • With virtual lobby, muting all or one attendee, application sharing, and interactive troubleshooting, Teams meeting attendees have better control of their meeting experience.  
  • Lastly, we haven’t forgotten the administrators or help desk professionals – with Call Analytics for Teams, we have also enabled them to monitor call and meeting quality and get detailed analytics for users’ meeting and calling experiences. 

This makes teams a perfect solution where you can communicate and meet with anyone inside or outside your organization – even if they are not a Teams user.   With these improvements, here are 9 tips to having more productive meetings with attendees in and outside your organization:

 

#1 - Join a meeting via Audio Conferencing.  What if you are on the road and don’t have access to the internet? Audio Conferencing (formally PSTN Conferencing) in Teams meetings is now generally available.  Users who are enabled for enabled Audio Conferencing will automatically see dial-in instructions added to their Teams meetings.  Dial-in numbers are supported in 90+ countries, 400+ cities, and 44 interactive voice response (IVR) languages.  Dial-out to add an attendee via their phone number is also supported.  The Audio Conferencing service in Office 365 can be enabled for any user of Office 365 and adds a low-cost audio conferencing to your Teams meetings so you can connect and collaborate with individuals on the phone as part of your meeting experiences.  

Teams Meeting Info PanelTeams Meeting Info Panel

 

 

#2 - Invite anyone via email.  Do you need to meet with someone outside of your organization? Don’t worry, with Anonymous Join, you can schedule a Teams meeting with anyone with a valid email address even if they are not in your organization.  You can invite any valid email address to a meeting while scheduling either from Teams or from Outlook and they will receive the meeting invite in their email with information on how to join the meeting. Your meeting guest can click on the link, enter their name and join the meeting.   Your guest will be able to join on web without having to install any client or if they want additional functionality, such as the ability to start sharing their screen, they can also install the desktop client and join anonymously.Teams meeting anonymous joinTeams meeting anonymous join

 

 

#3 - Admit attendees from the Lobby. Do you need a few seconds to get everything prepared? By default, all attendees who are not from your organization will arrive in a virtual lobby after which they will have to be admitted to join the actual meeting. This is done to enhance the privacy of your meetings – but also gives you time to make sure you’re ready for an important customer meeting. In the future, an admin will have the option to update the settings to allow anonymous users to join directly without having to go into lobby.

Teams meeting lobby supportTeams meeting lobby support

 

 

#4 - Mute the noisy attendees.  Tired of hearing a dog barking? In large meetings (> 5 people), anyone who joins after the meeting has started, will join as muted thereby reducing noise in the meeting. Further, if you notice any noise from others, you can mute that person, or mute everyone, easily from the roster.   If someone has been muted, they'll get a notification letting them know. They'll be able to unmute themselves if they need to be heard. If you ever need to mute all the other participants in a meeting, head to your meeting roster and select ‘Mute all’. Everyone will get a notification and be able to unmute themselves if they need to. 

Teams meetings mutingTeams meetings muting

#5 - Join a meeting or initiate a phone call without a plug-in.  Who has time for downloads?! You can now enjoy a plugin-less experience in a web browser where a meeting or a call just works!  You can simply go to teams.microsoft.com from Edge or Chrome and to join a Teams meeting or from Edge to initiate a 1:1 call. Now, you are able join a meeting or call even when you do not have access to the Teams app through your desktop or mobile device.

 

 Teams Meetings in Edge and Chrome. With this recent release you are now able to join a meeting from Edge with audio, video and incoming screen share.  If you are joining from Chrome, you can join a meeting with audio and incoming screen share -  joining with video via Chrome will be coming soon.

 

Teams meeting in EdgeTeams meeting in Edge

 

Teams Calling in Edge.  With this recent release, you are now able to initiate 1:1 calling from Edge including video, audio, and placing and receiving phone calls (phone calls in Teams require a user to have a calling plan from Office 365). 1:1 calling in Chrome is coming soon. Support for other browsers is planned for future releases. 

 

 

Teams video calling in EdgeTeams video calling in Edge

  

#6 - Share only the essentials. Don’t want everyone reading your email when you share your desktop? With Application sharing, you can choose to share a specific window instead of your entire screen. Rest assured that your desktop screen, or notifications are not shared when sharing your content in the meeting.

Teams meeting desktop and application sharingTeams meeting desktop and application sharing

#7 - Let others get in the driver seat.  What happens when you see something someone else doesn’t? With Application Sharing, if someone is sharing their desktop, you can either request to have control of it or have the sharer give you control of their desktop.

 

 

Teams meetings give and take controlTeams meetings give and take control

 

#8 - Get help with Interactive Troubleshooting. Have you ever forgotten to unmute yourself before you made a great argument in the meeting?  With Interactive Troubleshooting, Teams will alert you if it detects you're trying to speak but you are still muted.  This is the first scenario of many scenarios where Teams can proactively detect and advise attendees of common issues that may impact their productivity during a meeting.

 Teams interactive troubleshootingTeams interactive troubleshooting#9 – View Call Analytics for Teams.  If you need to troubleshoot a user’s meeting as an administrator, Call Analytics provides you and helpdesk professionals the ability to search for a Teams call history for a specified user calls and meetings to help troubleshoot issues with these experiences.

If a user is using both Teams and Skype for Business Online, we strive to have tools you leverage for Skype for Business also work on Teams.  With the preview of Call Analytics, all your users’ calls are in one place and we make it easy to identify which client was used. For each call, detailed metrics are provided that can help identify issues impacting the audio quality of the call or meeting. For more information about Call Analytics, please refer to: Set up Skype for Business Call Analytics, Use Call Analytics to troubleshoot poor Skype for Business call quality, and What's the difference between Call Analytics and Call Quality Dashboard?

 

 

Bonus #10 – Try Teams or watch a demo. If you don’t already have Teams, we encourage you to try it out to day: https://teams.microsoft.com/start. We also had a live demo of meetings during the February 1st , Teams On Air episode.  Guest Ruchir Astavans discussed and demoed the latest updates to Teams Meetings and Call Analytics.

 

If you’d like to give us your valuable feedback on any of the features above, visit us at microsoftteams.uservoice.com. 

 

 

25 Comments
Iron Contributor

I like the speed of joining a Teams meeting.  And the newer features coming out are great.  However, one of the features of Skype that I particularly like, but is a little more awkward with teams, is the option to have Skype call my phone rather than join the meeting using my computer audio.  Teams automatically connects me with the computer audio, and then I need to call out to myself, and then it says I'm an anonymous caller joining.  

 

Is there a way (or will there be a way) for me to configure my audio and/or phone settings and preferences?

 

thanks!

Mary

Brass Contributor

I'm glad to see these features.  I'm also very interested in the ability to join a teams meeting with no audio or join audio by having the system call me back.  Hopefully this will be available very soon.  I'm also interested in a personal meeting room capability.  Many other web conferencing services provide a personal meeting room URL, that you can share as an easy way of inviting others to a meeting.

 

Microsoft

@Ryan Marchant Thanks! A teams meeting can call you back once you've joined. The info panel has the option to of you entering your number and Teams will call you back.  The meeting organizer needs audio conferencing enabled for this to work. Check out the image below.  For personal URLs, we are always looking for ways to improve your experience and we're working on many more enhancements - more to share in the future! 

InfoPanel.png

 

 

 

Microsoft

@Mary F Harvey Not today, but that's great feedback and we'll look into it. 

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

I don't see these features? How can I schedule a meeting with someone externally? I add a mail address (gmail or hotmail), but that doesn't seem to work.

So, Anonymous join doesn't work.

Copper Contributor

Hi! Very great news!

I'm set as Targeted Release on my O365 tenant, but until now no Anonymous Join and Lobby found.

Do you know why ?

Thanks a lot

Copper Contributor

Hi,

When I try to add a gmail user, I still get the "Only Office 365 work or school accounts can be added as guests." message. 

 

I have the following version "You have Microsoft Teams Version 1.1.00.2251 (64-bit). It was last updated on 2/12/18"

 
Copper Contributor

For me, it's working now on version 1.1.00.2251 (64-bit) of the desktop client.

Deleted
Not applicable

We cannot see the options with our MS Teams during Audio Call. the Dial-ins andAudio conferencing PSTN

 

image.png

 

Here's our actual Call window:

image.png

Let me know if I have to enabled from our end. 

Copper Contributor

I am having problems with feature #7 only working sporadically. Sometimes the control option does not appear at all during a call, or it will disappear partway through the call. Could you provide further guidance on using this feature?

 

Thank you

Copper Contributor

Loving the ability to add people with personal emails. Any idea when you may expand capability to IOS and or other browsers. Noted in IOS t won't allow a user to join via chrome and if they install the teams app they get in but no video capability at present.

Iron Contributor

@Josh Beaird same problem here on my site. We can share the desktop, but the control option does not appear. If we send a "Request control", nothing to accept on presenter side.

Copper Contributor

Greets, friends!

 

New features are coming along well!  Does anyone know, are there plans to add screen/application sharing with a one-to-one chat (i.e. without being in a meeting) like SFB allowed?

 

Thanks!

 

Deleted
Not applicable

@Delanda Coleman

In response to Item #2, specifically:

 

Your guest will be able to join on web without having to install any client or if they want additional functionality, such as the ability to start sharing their screen, they can also install the desktop client and join anonymously.

 

Does Microsoft have a timeline when they will support screen sharing through a browser without the desktop client? This is a feature that would allow us to break free from our current meeting service. 

 

Copper Contributor

joining with video via Chrome will be coming soon

Is there an ETA for this?

Iron Contributor

@Delanda Coleman

Tip #7 "give control" and "request control" in screen sharing in Microsoft Teams doesn't work at all on Windows 7. Any idea when this will work? https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_teams-mso_o365b/ms-teams-c...

Copper Contributor

Just FYI: video chat works on Linux with Google Chrome and user agent switcher set to "Edge 13". Video calls (one:one and conference) work, screensharing does not. 

 

The useragent string: 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586

Bronze Contributor

How can we easily automatically admit all attendees to a Microsoft Teams meeting?  The virtual lobby is rather annoying today for meetings with a large amount of participants (50+ people).

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

How do we hold our Teams meeting while answering Skype calls? 

I was only able to exit Teams meeting. Is there any better way?

 

Thanks.

Any updates on: "joining with video via Chrome will be coming soon."?

Copper Contributor

How do we chat during the meeting with the participants of the Teams meeting?

Hi Devesh :waving_hand: - there’s toggle icon in the top right when you’re in a call / meeting 

Hi everyone! As we transitioned from Skype to Teams for some virtual classes, I was wondering if it's possible to track attendance in Teams. We used to do it in Skype via OneNote. Does anyone know how it goes now?

Appreciate any kind of help :)

Copper Contributor

Amen to Personal Meeting URL's. Tools like Calendly or Join.Me have this feature and it's pretty nice. Easily embedded into email templates etc.

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