Teams meeting attendees

[chriswillson]

Hi peeps, 

Just wanted to check my understanding of the pros and cons of using the differing ways to schedule a meeting in Teams.

I'm aware of the (major?) issue with simply scheduling a meeting in a channel, in that Team members will NOT receive an outlook meeting invite, but WILL receive a notification when the meeting is about to start.

I'm also aware that you can get around this by still adding the channel, but manually adding all attendees, who will all then receive an invite in their outlook.

We've already had an example where a team member was accidentally missed off the manual invite, and so had nothing in their calendar - although they did receive notifications for each meeting.

It got me to thinking though....  What happens if you wanted to have a meeting in a channel (so posts, files, notes, etc are all stored centrally) but you don't need ALL team members to attend?  

Based on my testing, this isn't possible, but it also seems to be rather onerous to have to set up another Team simply to facilitate this. 

What about the legitimate scenario where it may simply be a senior staff/project leads meeting to discuss a particular issue and agree a public response?  

It seems you can only either hold a meeting outside the channel, or include everyone.  IN the former case, you'd have to ensure any relevant information/files are then manually added to the channel documents, which again seems less that ideal.

We're trying to avoid O365 Group/Data sprawl, by limiting the creation of multiple short-lived teams (and the associated group email, sharepoint site collection, etc).

Anyone got any experience they can share for how they've addressed this issue, as I'm sure it's a frequent scenario for most businesses?

[#2]

*nudge

[#3]

@chriswillson Have you thought about adding a private channel in the team with the subset of members that you need and using that channel in the invite?

[#4]

This is a big problem for us. We have been unable to log my daughter into her Teams school account for unknown reasons, so she signs in under her mother's account. This triggers multiple notifications - every 2 seconds of so - on my wife's computer, as she relies on teams too - while she's trying to work and every student in my daughter's class is posting chats.

[#5]

@chriswillson You are asking quite a few different questions there.

In general I would say the clients I work with schedule their meetings through Outlook, and they are not in a channel if it's for a large group. The only time I see channel meetings is in focused projects, e.g. a daily standup in a project team.

As maturity of Teams grows the number of planned and scheduled meetings decreases. If you are truly working as a Team you are in contact all the time through conversations, working out loud with sharing document while you are working on them, other people inserting comments and contributing materials. Every so often this might escalate into a voice or video call spontaneously. This is some of what we talk about as transformation, true teamwork and group accountability, rather than a top down culture of meetings.

In your case if one group of users want to discuss something, they probably already been discussing it. If it was sensitive then that might be in a private channel as a permanent structure, or a group chat if just temporary. If they feel they need to get on a call to sort it out reply to the thread with a meeting.