Using teams meetings as an event signup

Copper Contributor



Hi tech community,

 

I had the idea of using the meeting function in teams as a sort of a signup for events for a group of volunteers who use teams with me. We need a signup-function for talks, non-compulsory meetings and social events. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be a good fit. There are two main reasons for this.

 

Firstly, I would very much like to avoid using outlook/email invitations. The reason is that these always seem to run into problems because many of the volunteers forward their emails to other addresses which has the result that their answers are never sent all the way back to the organizer of the meeting.

 

Secondly, it seems that “join” in a teams meeting means opening the camera so that you can actually sit in on the meeting. To new users of teams, this will definitely be confusing.

 

I was hoping that teams meetings could be used as something like a facebook event where people accept or decline in teams while being able to see who else participates – without any emails involved.

 

(About the calendar/email-forwarding issue: It could be useful if meetings are forwarded to the calendar after acceptance – maybe as a calendar that your outlook email subscribes to - just as my private calendar subscribes to my facebook events).

 

Is my analysis of the not optimal fit between my hopes and the meetings in teams correct? Or am I overlooking a setting or a function in teams somewhere?

 

And if so, do any of you know which app I could use instead?

 

Regards,

Martin

2 Replies

Hi,

 

Teams is probably not the best product for what you are looking for. I can describe what we uses Teams for when organising an event in Sweden in a couple of weeks (Teamsdagen).

 

We uses Teams for collaboration for the Organisation team. We have a couple of different channels and chat threads (with different topics). We upload files to Teams that we work with together, Teams allows many of us to work with the same file at the same time. We also have weekly meetings in Teams, and in these meetings we summarise the discussions from the chat threads in the different channels.

 

For "Call for Speakers" we used Microsoft Forms. We created a form with a couple of different questions that speakers filled out and sent in to us. Then we also used a Power Automate flow to send a summary the the speaker (e-mail) and to one of our channels in Teams and to a Excel sheet.

 

To sell the tickets we used Eventbrite that attendees were able to sign up and get their ticket. 

 

 

You could use Teams for some of the organisation but if you invite them as guests there is some license requirements, for each Teams license you get you can invite 5 guests. 

 

So you can use Teams for some stuff and other applications for other stuff.

Thanks for the reply, @Linus Cansby.

 

The reason why I would like to keep the event signup in teams, is that we have the users created in this system. If I move into another app, I have to remember or copy the many emailadresses of the 100 people or so. Therefore it would be so great if teams - or an app that can be fully integrated into teams - had a feature that let me have the events here.

 

Regards,

Martin