Meetings in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams

In this training, we introduce meetings in Microsoft Teams. We'll cover the capabilities of meetings in Teams in addition to requirements and planning considerations for Teams.

Note

This tutorial includes links to existing content to help connect you with the latest, most up-to-date information. For an optimal learning experience, follow the links to learn and apply. If a link is labeled as “additional information,” you can consider it optional.

This training is for you if you're:

An IT pro
Responsible for planning, deploying, or managing Teams
Interested in meetings in Teams

We'll cover the following sections:

Meetings and meeting types in Teams
Requirements for meetings
Reporting

The following information is out of scope:

Meetings can include a feature where participants are able to join meetings from a regular phone line. This feature, called Audio Conferencing, is out of scope for the training.

Note

Microsoft Teams is evolving on a regular basis—new features and functionality are added frequently. Please monitor the following resources to stay up-to-date:

Follow the Teams Blog.
Read the Teams Roadmap.
Learn about the latest released features in the Release Notes.
Participate in the Microsoft Teams technical community to get your feature questions answered.

If you have any questions or feedback about this training, please:

Post in the comments section at the bottom of the "Next steps" page of this tutorial.

To give us product feedback about Teams, such as ideas for new features, please visit Teams feedback portal.

Meetings in Teams

69 minutes remaining

To understand meetings in Teams, see the following:

"Have meetings" in Meetings and calls (estimated reading time 6 minutes)
Meet now video (1:45 minutes)
Scheduled meetings video (1:45 minutes)
9 tips for meeting with Microsoft Teams to learn about the meeting lobby, joining meetings anonymously, and more (estimated reading time 6 minutes)

Scenario - Meeting types

53 minutes remaining

Garth works for Contoso, a company that has multiple offices. Garth needs to connect to people in other office locations on a regular basis:

His project team meets every Monday for an hour. Because they already have a dedicated channel for their project in Microsoft Teams, Garth schedules a "Channel Meeting" for this regular sync. This has multiple benefits for Garth and his team:
- All members of the team are automatically invited.
- Any meeting-related discussions before, during, or after the meeting are part of the channel discussion.
- The meeting and the discussion are visible to everyone who is a member of the team.
- Turn on live captions for meetings and live events. In addition, they turn on subtitles in live events. These features increase inclusivity, productivity, and comprehension.
Garth also needs to sync with individual people but doesn't want these meetings to be visible to others. For these purposes, Garth schedules a "Private Meeting". Private meetings allow Garth to initiate a chat before the meeting takes place. This pre-meeting experience helps make the meeting more effective because Garth can share material beforehand or discuss the agenda with key team members. The same chat is also available during the meeting to capture notes, and can be used afterward for any follow-ups.
Sometimes the team has lively discussions in their channel, and Garth needs them to come to a quick decision. He determines that while everyone is typing, a video call might be the more effective way to communicate. In this situation, Garth schedules an ad-hoc meeting by selecting Meet Now in the current conversation.

In Teams, meeting organizers can end a meeting for all meeting participants. This is useful in scenarios such as the following:

Educators can ensure that students don't stay in a meeting unsupervised after a class is finished.
For meetings that are being recorded, such as webinars, meeting organizers can ensure that the recording ends when the meeting ends.

For example, when the meeting is finished, Garth can click End meeting from within the meeting in Teams to end it and remove all participants from it.

Meeting clients

52 minutes remaining

Joining meetings is possible from a variety of clients. Review Get clients for Microsoft Teams (estimated reading time 3 minutes) to understand which platforms Teams is available for.

In addition, by using Audio Conferencing, participants can attend meetings from regular phones by dialing in to the meeting or dialing out from the meeting. Details about Audio Conferencing will be covered in a dedicated training.

In Outlook for Windows, you can use an add-in to schedule meetings directly from your calendar. Review Use the Teams Meeting add-in in Outlook (estimated reading time 2 minutes).

Requirements and considerations for meetings

47 minutes remaining

Licensing

Although you can hold meetings without having any additional licenses—all you need is a license for Microsoft Teams—some scenarios do require additional licensing.

Audio Conferencing, which lets participants join Teams meetings from a regular phone, requires an additional license. This will be addressed in a dedicated training on Audio Conferencing.

For more information, see Microsoft Teams service description.

Bandwidth and media flow

In Teams, there are two ways to initiate real-time communication:

A user can call another user directly
A user can create a meeting (ad hoc or scheduled) For calls, the media (audio, video, or desktop or application sharing) travel as directly as possible. If, for example, there's no firewall between two users (for example, both sit inside the same network), media traffic travels directly from one user to the other. If a firewall blocks direct traffic between the users, the traffic will be sent via a relay.

For meetings, all traffic is sent first to the conferencing service that is homed in Office 365. Audio traffic is collected there and mixed before being sent back; video traffic and application or desktop sharing are received and distributed to the attendees.

Important! During the duration of the COVID-19 outbreak, we recommend that users join meetings by clicking the Join Teams Meeting button rather than dialing in by using the PSTN conference numbers or by using Call me at. This is primarily because of congestion in the telephony infrastructures of countries impacted by COVID-19. By avoiding PSTN calls, you'll likely experience better audio quality.

Planning bandwidth isn't covered in this training, but it will be crucial for the user experience.

For more information, see Prepare your organization's network for Teams.

Exchange dependencies

For customers using Exchange Server on-premises, there might be (depending on the version of Exchange Server) some limitations when it comes to creating and viewing meetings from the Teams client, but also when it comes to compliance. Review How Exchange and Microsoft Teams interact (estimated reading time 3 minutes) to understand potential limitations.

End meetings for all participants

Meeting organizers can end a meeting for all participants by clicking End meeting from within the meeting. This is helpful in scenarios such as the following:

Educators can ensure that students don't stay in a meeting unsupervised after a class is finished.
For meetings that are being recorded, such as webinars, meeting organizers can ensure that the recording ends when the meeting ends.

To learn more, see End a Teams meeting for everyone in attendance.

Change participant settings for a meeting

Meeting organizers can change the default participant settings for a specific meeting in Meeting options. There are three ways to get there:

Go to the Calendar in Teams, select a meeting, and then select Meeting options.
In a meeting invitation, select Meeting options.
Select Show participants to open the People pane, and then select Manage Permissions.

To learn more, see Change participant settings for a Teams meeting.

Meeting configuration options

43 minutes remaining

As an IT administrator, you can set meeting policies and settings to define the meeting experience.

Meeting policies

Use Teams meeting policies to control the features that are available to meeting participants for meetings that are scheduled by users in your organization. To learn more, see Manage meeting policies in Teams (estimated reading time 16 minutes).

Meeting settings

Use Teams meetings settings to control whether anonymous users can join Teams meetings, customize meeting invitations, and if you want to enable Quality of Service (QoS), set port ranges for real-time traffic. These settings apply to all Teams meetings that users schedule in your organization. To learn more, see Manage meeting settings in Teams. (estimated time reading time 4 minutes).

Exercise - Configure meetings

23 minutes remaining

In this exercise, you'll have the chance to test meetings in Teams. Although we don't describe how to perform every action, we recommend some scenarios to try out.

Requirements

An Office 365 organization with appropriate licenses to use Teams
- We strongly recommend that you use a dedicated test tenant.
- If you don't have a test tenant, you can sign up for a trial tenant at Office 365 Enterprise E5 Trial.
- Don't run any tests in your production environment. Changing settings or policies might have a negative impact on all users and might affect their user experience.
At least two endpoints
This can be two PCs, but you can also use the client on your mobile phone.

Suggested scenarios to test

Schedule different meeting types from within the Teams client: Channel meetings, ad-hoc meetings, private meetings.
Schedule meetings by using the Outlook add-in.
For scheduled meetings, initiate a chat before the meeting begins (to discuss the agenda, for example).
Join meetings and test different scenarios and workloads: For example, audio only, video, desktop sharing.
Join a meeting from a browser without signing in to your tenant (you might want to use "InPrivate" browsing) to see what it's like to join a meeting anonymously.
Sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center and change some of the settings for meetings (for example, disable scheduling for private meetings). How does this affect the user experience?
As the meeting organizer, end a meeting for all participants.

Reporting

3 minutes remaining

From a reporting perspective, there are two areas to look at:

Usage: How many meetings take place?
Quality: What is the quality of the meetings?

You should carefully monitor both areas:

Low usage means that users, for one reason or another, aren't using the product. You can only determine the reasons by doing additional investigation. Reasons can range from the perception that meetings are falling short of user requirements, to a lack of awareness or training, to quality problems.
Low quality, on the other hand, means that there are issues with connectivity between users and Office 365. Low quality can lead to bad user experience and lower usage. Refer to Microsoft 365 Reports in the Admin Center - Microsoft Teams user activity (estimated reading time 5 minutes) to learn more about the usage reports.

Managing quality is outside of the scope of this training, but see the following training material:

For information about the role of Quality Champion, see Quality champion role.
For information about the Call Quality Dashboard, see Investigate Media Quality using CQD.

Next steps

100% complete!

We covered the following key learnings in this training:

Meetings and meeting types in Teams
Requirements for meetings
Reporting

Next steps

1.Start using meetings in Teams. 2. Send us feedback: - Post in the comments section at the bottom of this page. - To give us Teams product feedback or to request a new feature, go to Teams Feedback portal. 3. Stay up to date: - Follow the Teams Blog. - Read the Teams Roadmap. - Learn about the latest released features in the Release Notes 4. Explore more training and tutorials.