365 features, tips, and tricks – Meetings

Problem: Organising meetings can be a near impossibility and very time-consuming.

Solution: Microsoft Teams ‘Meeting’ tool

Microsoft Teams – one of the world’s most successful apps ever created, with an average daily user count of 115 million, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has gradually risen to be a force to be reckoned with. A particularly popular feature of Teams is its audio/video conferencing capabilities which allow you to hold a meeting with up to 300 people, and ‘live events’ with up to 20,000 – a truly staggering number!

Meetings has been designed to be an intuitive platform. We do not need to go through the basics but let us have a look at the features of Meetings commonly overlooked and explore some tools that will help the way you and your employees work.

Scheduling Meetings and the Scheduling assistant

It can be particularly tedious scheduling meetings – whether your team is 10 strong or 1,000 it can prove challenging to find a time when you and your team are all available. Teams ‘scheduling assistant’ makes this task much easier. Let us have a look how to use it.

1. Access the calendar tab and click ‘new meeting’ in the top corner below your user icon.

2. A form will appear. Enter the names of those you wish to attend the meeting, input start and end times for the meeting, link it to a channel, set it to recur if you want to, and so on.

Sounds like any other application designed around booking meetings, right? Yes, it is similar, but Teams is unique in many ways. The next step is the most noticeable.

3. Once having entered the name(s) of participants to the meeting, you are presented with suggested times. Teams analyses the schedules of all the selected participants and offers times that suit everyone, saving the time you would have spent in doing it yourself.

Another feature is ‘In-Meeting’ chat.

In-Meeting chat

A participant in the meeting may need to communicate with another participant, but just speaking up will interrupt the speaker and the person holding the meeting. Muting everyone does not make for a very productive setting. In-Meeting instant messaging makes this possible without interrupting the speaker.

To display the chat interface, select ‘show conversation’ from the menu of actions at the top right of the meeting window.

This leads onto another tool that avoids disruption. The ‘raise your hand’ feature in a meeting.

‘Raise your hand’

With this feature you can get the attention of the speaker without interrupting the entire meeting. We will now take a brief look at how to achieve this.

1. Select the hand icon from the menu of actions, ‘this action’, then * (star).
2. This action will then appear as a notification in the ‘show participants’ tab. Anyone who raises their hand will have an icon displayed beside their name. 

By using the selection of features Teams has to offer correctly, you too can reap the benefits like the millions of other people worldwide. Take some time to explore Teams thoroughly and learn of its different features, and it will soon become apparent that some of its best tools can be found below the surface.

Want to find out about some of Teams’ more intricate features?

Would you like to make your tech fit for your workforce both remotely and in office?

We are here to help you.

We’re Netplatforms.

Our years of experience supporting small to medium businesses across London and Essex has perfectly equipped us to know exactly how to support you. We take our time to get to know you, your values, your company, and its ethos to ensure we give you the support that you require. We will create a solution that best suits you – and all at a very sensible cost.

0207 993 9035 or hello@netplatforms.wmtemp.com.

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