Best practice to invite people to recurring meetings (both internal and external guests)?

Copper Contributor

I am looking for best practice to invite people to recurring meetings (both internal and external guests).

 

My scenario is as follows: I have a recurring team meeting in Teams where I want to invite guests from time to time. The guests can be people who work at the same company or external guests. The guests are usually only participating parts of the team meetings. What is the best way?

 

Thoughts..

  • How should I invite them? A regular meeting without Team's link and when it's their turn are they added to the ongoing meeting? Does it work for external guests?
  • How can I ensure that the guest cannot see past or upcoming conversations in the Team Meeting chat? Maybe the only solution is what’s already explained here
  • Is the solution to create a Team in Teams and invite to meetings from the Team? This way it seems that guests does not have the option to see the chat at all and they are not automatically added to the Team.

 

Thanks in advance!

3 Replies

Hi @Winqvist Yes, I would agree with using Outlook to better control the members of the meeting.  Anyone else?

You mean a regular meeting without a Team's meeting link, then invite the person to the ongoing meeting?
I try to give people advice to avoid recurrence as much as possible when involving anyone other than yourself. One adage really applies well to recurrence -"Never say never" - People often set up recurrence and say things like that will never happen, it will never be on a different day, or the people will never change. Sometimes you may want to change the meeting date, or you want to forward the invite to an extra guest speaker/attendee (thus inviting them to all unwanted recurring updates). Or after a year, the meetings stop but everyone will still have it on their calendar.
If you are the organizer, use recurrence for yourself to set a recurring reminder that a meeting needs to be scheduled every week/month/quarter. Use that recurrence interval to send out a custom for the specific meeting. It will ensure you are sending it to the most up-to-date members, your chats are relevant to the invited attendees, you can include all relevant information to that specific meeting, and it will make meetings look well planned and intentional.
If you do plan to use recurrence for meetings, stop the recurrence after a certain number of events such as 5 or 10 so that you are regularly reviewing the attendees, agenda, and are cutting off chats which may contain confidential information.
I apologize this isn't a technical solution but as a process solution, it should make your invited guests feel a greater sense of purpose for the meetings they are invited to.