We’re actually not even going to begin in Teams. There are advantages to book your meeting in the client and one of the biggest is that you’re able to schedule your meeting within a channel of a Team. Using this method, your team members will get the meeting in their calendar as well as a reminder in the Team channel. Things written during the Meeting will also be stored in the channel instead of in a closed of chat room for those who where summoned.

This benefit does however not outweigh one of my favorite (and perhaps most neglected) features in Word and Outlook; Autotext.

I’ve written about this feature in another blog post regarding meetings already so please feel free to freshen up on your skills from that one.

https://www.altitude365.com/2018/02/12/produtive-meetings/

Since that blogpost pretty much cover the getting started part, we’ll just jump to the actual meeting in Teams!

When clicking Join, this is where you begin. Don’t just jump right into the meeting from here by clicking “Join now!”, you’re missing out on a great opportunity for you entrance!

First of all, try to activate the camera by switching on the left trigger. When activated, you’ll be able to activate the blurry background feature in the middle! Really nice effect that will cover up you background so that people can focus on what’s important: You!

When ready, click join now and enter the wonderful virtual world, or room, of the Teams meeting area!

Did you just now find out that other have to join but you forgot to invite them? No problem! Click here to get the information about your virtual room and simply copy all the information any ad-hoc participants might need to join you.

Please note that I have the E5-licenses that comes with the Audio conferencing license. That’s why people are able to call into my meetings using their phones if they for some weird reason would be unable to use a Teams client.

If you want to bring someone into the meeting a bit faster, just bring them into it using the call feature. Hit this button to show participants. At the top you’ll have a box where you can type in a name or an email address. Click Enter after your done and that person will get a call in Teams. If they accept, they’ll find themselves being participants in your Teams meeting!

Type the name or email in the box, hit enter, go back to your important meeting.

Next one up. Recording! Use it, don’t be afraid of it. It will start recording the meeting and when you’re done, you just click stop recording and the video will automatically be put in Stream where you can distribute it. If you scheduled your meeting in a Teams channel, the video is automatically uploaded to that Teams Stream area.

Time for some sharing!

Sharing is easier than most people seem to think actually. Have a look!

You can see 4 sections down here:

• Desktop
• Window
• PowerPoint
• Whiteboard

Desktop

Use this option if you want to share your entire desktop! This is useful if you want to share multiple windows for example.

Window

If you’re only going to show something in a web browser, don’t share the entire screen. There’s no need! Just share that window. An important upgrade from Skype is that if you share a Window in Teams, you can now have other things in front of that window and it won’t show some black squares on your participants screens.

This is also a preferred option if you have a big monitor with high resolution and sharing content to people with smaller monitors and less resolution. Sharing your desktop in this case will give the others a really small screen to watch while sharing a window gives you the ability to scale. Shrink your window, and it will appear bigger for your participants!

PowerPoint

Alright, why is this even an option? Couldn’t you just share the desktop and start PowerPoint in presentation mode? Well, this is sort of like “couldn’t you just use 1 00 times more duct tape? Well yes… yes you could totally do that”.

Using the PowerPoint option when sharing will upload your PowerPoint into the meeting. That way the others are not depending on your internet connection and they get to move around in the presentation while you present and they won’t disturb anyone while doing it!

If you’re holding on to some secret slides and want to surprise your attendees, just click this button and people are no longer allowed to move around by themselves and they’re now following you as you move through your slides.

Last but not least! The whiteboard.

You no longer need to be in an analogue conference room, writing non-digital stuff on a surface on the wall since you have this digital solution built in!

Personally, I prefer to open the Whiteboard app on Windows 10 at this point. Begin by sharing the Whiteboard, then click this button to open Whiteboard on the computer. In my experience, it just works a bit smoother and you get more options for drawings.

Remember that you can move freely in teams while in your meeting. When clicking the chat menu or the Team menu, you’ll simply get a small window of your meeting up in the left corner. Click anywhere on the dark area of my picture here (might be a presentation when you have your actual meeting for example) and you’ll be brought back to the previous view of the meeting.

That should cover the basics. Key take away from this should be to try and click some buttons from time to time just to see what happens. It might surprise you how many features you can find that will save you a ton of time later on.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out! Schedule a Teams meeting with me and I’ll show you more 😉 You’ll reach me on ville.gullstrand@altitude365.com

You can also find our workshop “Work more efficiently with Teams” below: