Teams Plugin for Outlook creating meeting for wrong tenant

Question

Like many people who do consulting work for multiple clients, I am a user across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants. I use Teams for all of them. For just Outlook and email, this is fine and a complete non-issue. Teams is not as smart.

Aside from the pain point of having no good way to be in multiple tenants at the same time in the Teams desktop application (I am forced to use the web based Teams for most tenants, with a different Edge profile for each, so I can pin each separately to my Taskbar, but the web version of Teams falls far short of the desktop app with respect to meeting capabilities), the plugin for Outlook creates an even more serious problem: when I hit the button to make a meeting be a Teams meeting, it's often (but not always, and I've not found any pattern) for the wrong tenant. 

The Outlook message is coming from the correct tenant's calendar. The plugin was installed from one particular tenant. The block that it adds includes the logo and dial-in numbers for that tenant, always (regardless of which tenant I'm using to create the meeting). However, the link to join the meeting seems to pick a tenant at random. Worse still, there's no easy way to tell by looking at the link if it's right or wrong. The only way I know to tell is to click on it, and see if I can join or if it tells me that I need to wait for an organizer to let me in (which is obviously wrong -- I AM the organizer!). When it tells me to wait for an organizer, other participants all get the same message and so there's no way for anyone to join the meeting. It breaks the meeting.

So far, all I can think to do is check the link before I send the meeting invite and if it's wrong, cancel the meeting invite, start over, and hope this time I get a usable link. 

Has anyone else encountered this problem? How do you work around it or fix it?

Ultimately, this sure seems like a bug the MS needs to fix with the Teams Outlook plugin, but until then, I'd settle for a decent a work-around.

Thanks,

Colin

Answer 1

This is happening to me as well. Very frustrating, and I've run into the same issue where the client is waiting for me to join the meeting to let them in. It took me a while to figure out why this is happening, but I think it has to do with MS Teams and Guest Tenant access. If you're using Teams and you've been invited to someoen's tenant as a guest, then you've likely switched to that other tenant. If you switch to that other tenant during the day, and schedule meetings while logged into that tenant as Guest (on the MS Teams client app, not web app), then here lies the problem.

Solution until Microsoft fixes this bug:

1. Make sure that your meeting invite has a Teams link associated with your tenant. How? There is a Meeting Options link as shown below. Hover over it, and it will show you your Tenant ID. To learn how to check your tenant ID, read here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/find-your-office-365-tenant-id

2. IMPORTANT step: Before you start your meeting, exit completely out of MS Teams client, and re-launch it. That will somehow reset Teams and make sure that when you start a teams meeting, it starts under the correct tenant.

The trick is that if you were logged into the client tenant as Guest, then you must be signed into that tenant as Guest and the meeting will launch with you as host, even if your Teams tenant is correct in the meeting invite. Very bizzare, and clearly a bug. I can't imagine this is intended functionality.

3. Alternative solution: Before scheduling ANY meeting, shut down teams completely. Then schedule the meeting from Outlook. Then re-open teams. This will make sure there is no crossover confusion.

Good luck with this. Until resolved, I will just shut down teams before scheduling my meetings. Annoying.

Martin

Answer 2

This is a very annoying bug. Find root cause and fix this,

Any person needing to work in multiple tenants, will have faced this issue. I have multiple times. Very bad user experience and even worse, makes you look real bad as conusltant!

I try to stay positive Microsoft, but you make it really hard for us on occasions.

This is breaking meetings all over the globe.

Answer 3

Hi GraniteStateColin,

Welcome posting in the forum.

When you use Teams meeting button in Outlook, you must make sure they sign in the same account, otherwise, it may cause issues.

Given your situation, you can try methods in this official article: I can’t start Microsoft Outlook or receive the error “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook Window”

Regards,

Grace

Grace, thanks for the reply, but I don't understand how to make sense of that. How can they match when one has multiple values and the other doesn't support that? I work with multiple tenants. Outlook is connected to several, that's not been a problem in Outlook, since about Outlook 2010. However, Teams is severely limited to only connecting to a single Tenant at a time. This is the #2 User Voice feature for Teams with over 32k votes: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17750851-i-want-to-use-multiple-teams-accounts-at-the-same

If all you mean is that ONE of the Outlook account connections must match a Teams account, that's fine. I'm already doing that. If you mean I can't use multiple accounts in Outlook, that's not remotely an option. 

Could you give some additional details to your suggestion?

Thanks,

Colin

Answer 4

Hi GraniteStateColin,

Welcome posting in the forum.

When you use Teams meeting button in Outlook, you must make sure they sign in the same account, otherwise, it may cause issues.

Given your situation, you can try methods in this official article: I can’t start Microsoft Outlook or receive the error “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook Window”

Regards,

Grace