2021 Win at remote working with 365 – Meetings
Problem: Organising meetings can be time-consuming
Solution: Microsoft Teams ‘Meetings’ tool
Whatever your knowledge of Teams, one feature that has likely caught your attention is the ability to hold virtual meetings. Audio/video conferencing is one of the main attractions of Microsoft Teams; it allows you to hold a meeting with up to 300 participants, and ‘live events’ with up to 20,000! Teams is equipped to unite a workforce no matter the geographical location.
Meetings has been designed as an intuitive platform. Let us skip the basics and delve deeper into the features of Meetings that you may have overlooked and discover tools that will further enrich your Teams experience.
Meeting Scheduling and the Scheduling assistant
Whether your organisation has 1,000 employees or 10, scheduling meetings can prove to be challenging. Teams makes this task much easier with its easy-to-use scheduling assistant. You can access it through the ‘new meeting’ tool in the calendar tab.
To arrange a meeting in advance, navigate to the calendar tab on the left. Then, select ‘new meeting,’ located below your user icon in the top right. You will then see a form into which you can enter all your meeting requirements. Enter the names of those you wish to attend, including a start and end time, link the meeting to a channel, set the meeting to recur if you wish, and so on.
Here is what sets Teams apart from the rest.
Once having entered the name(s) of participants to the meeting, you are presented with suggested times (just below the date and time section of the form). Teams analyses the schedules of all the selected participants and offer times that suit everyone, saving the time you would have spent in doing it yourself.
A nice feature in Meetings is the ‘In-Meeting’ chat.
In-Meeting Chat
Someone in the meeting may need to ask a question or communicate with another participant of the meeting. 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.
Another tool to note is the ability to ‘raise your hand’ in a meeting
‘Raise your hand’
A tool that lets you get the speaker’s attention without interrupting. Select the hand icon from the menu of actions, select ‘this action’, then * (star).
This action will then appear as a notification in the ‘show participants’ tab. Any attendee who raises their hand will have an icon displayed beside their name.
Teams has a multitude of different features capable of revolutionising the way you and your teamwork, both in-office and when working remotely. Take some time to explore Microsoft Teams and play around with its different features – you will soon discover the platform has more to offer than just what it presents at face value.
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If you are not yet using Microsoft 365 for your business, you may want to read our article on how to migrate to it.
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