Using Teams to Communicate with Parents

[MarkLent]

Hi,

I am looking in to using Teams for my Tutor group at school. I can add all the students easily but want I want to do is be able to set up a Parent meeting with the students parents.

So for example, if a student is misbehaving in school or needs praise, I want to be able to contact the parents using Teams. I know I can easily contact the students as they have their own accounts, but would Parents also need their own account in order for this to be possible?

I have seen something about adding parents as 'guests' but this raises a concern as I am not sure if it would allow parents to see contact details of other students or other parents which is a clear safeguarding and GDPR issue.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Mark.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@MarkLent When you schedule a Teams meeting, you can invite participants from outside your organization by entering their email addresses in the list of attendees. This does not add them to your organization as guest users (as opposed to inviting outside users to join a Team, which does).

For more information, see the Schedule a meeting in Teams article at Microsoft Support.

[#3]

@Ryan Steele Thanks for this! Exactly what I needed. So if this was a call or video meeting would it go through Teams and so parents would need it installed? Or would it just allow them to join the meeting from a link? Thanks.

[#4]

@MarkLent When an external participant clicks on the "Join Teams Meeting" link in the meeting invitation, they will be taken to a web page that looks something like this:

If they don't have the Teams app installed and don't want to download it, they can choose the "Continue on this browser" option to join the meeting from within the browser. 

This assumes that they're using one of the browsers listed as supporting meetings here.