How to Create & Join Meetings

Welcome back to our Microsoft Teams Journey series! In today’s issue, we look at creating and managing meetings. But first, if you haven’t already, check out our previous topics that cover important groundwork to get you started:

Issue #1 – What is Teams
Issue #2 – How to navigate the Teams platform
Issue #3 – Calling and Zoom Integration

Sometimes, your team discussions require a face-to-face conversation, to help get a message across or quickly cover an important topic. Meetings are one of the best tools for collaboration as you can easily join, create, schedule, record and include people outside of your organization, all from one place and at any time.

There are two ways to schedule a meeting, either through Outlook or directly from the Teams application.

Meetings from Teams

There are a few choices to schedule a meeting in Teams, using either Meet Now or through the chat and teams’ tabs. Before we go into that, let’s first look at the various ways you can join a meeting:

Link – the most common way. Select Join Microsoft Teams Meeting in your meeting invite and the meeting will open automatically.

Calendar – Click the Calendar tab on the left side of the app to see your meetings. Find the meeting you are interested in and select Join.

Channel – If the meeting is taking place in a channel, you will see a button to join and some meeting details below, like the attendees and discussed content.

Chat – if the meeting has already started, it will appear in your recent chat list. Simply choose the meeting from your chat list and click on the Join button.

Call In – in some instances, when you are not able to use the Teams application (like during load-shedding), you can join some meetings by calling a phone number.

Great, now that we have covered joining a meeting, let’s continue to creating them.

To start a meeting from a chat, click on the Schedule a meeting button in the chat box as shown here:

To start a meeting outside of the chat, go to the Calendar tab and click on the + New Meeting button:

Both options will take you the scheduling form, where you fill in the usual meeting details such as title, attendees, date and time of the meeting.

You can use the Scheduling Assistant tab to help you find the best time through the calendar view.

Adding a guest

To invite someone who is not part of the organisation, we recommend first adding them as a Guest on your Teams. To add a guest, simply add a member to your selected Team and enter the persons email address instead of a known contact.

Once you have added the guests email address, be sure to edit the guest information in order change the displayed name.

Please note that the guest should have a Microsoft Account associated with their email address, and if they do not then they will be directed to create a free one. However, an anonymous option is available, although not recommended.

Meet Now

There are two ways to create a meeting with Meet Now. First, using the button featured in the chat box:

Click on the Meet Now in a new conversation to start the meeting for the entire discussion or click in an existing conversation, under the reply button, to stay with the relevant context.

You will then see the video preview, where you can give the meeting a name and have the option to set up the camera or schedule the meeting. If you are happy with the information, click on the Meet Now button to begin.

Now you can select the names of the team members you want to invite, through the suggestions tab or simply typing in the name yourself. You can also type a phone number, to add people outside of your organisation.

Secondly, you can use Meet Now directly from the calendar tab and follow the same procedures:

How to Create & Join Meetings

Meetings from Teams

Adding a guest

Meet Now

Quick Links