Microsoft Teams – Communication

A good standard of communication in your business can be difficult, especially with the problems in the world at the moment. The pandemic has made a good level of cross-platform connectivity at the forefront of concerns within a business.

Many businesses are struggling with keeping their staff up to date with the latest business techniques and strategies via meetings/conferences, with a lot of team members working full time from their homes. Many are currently contacting staff at home by a variety of different means making organisation and maximum time productivity difficult to achieve.

Teams offers a unique experience, offering meetings, instant message and file sharing all in one place. Let us take a look at some of the details of Teams communication tools.

Scheduling Meetings

Whatever the size of your business, scheduling meetings that fit all staff schedules can be difficult. Teams offers a solution with its easy to use schedule assistant which is accessible in the ‘new meeting’ tool located within the ‘Calendar’ tab.

To arrange a meeting in advance, once you have clicked Calendar on the left, select ‘new meeting’ located below your user icon on the right. You can then enter all the meeting information into the form. Enter all details; names of attendees and start and end time, and link the meeting to a channel, you can make the meeting recurring if you wish, and so on.

Here is where things start to get interesting, once having entered the names of your participants you are given suggested times just below the time and date section of the form. Teams can cross-reference the schedules of all participants selected and pick out time windows that are free in their schedules saving you time having to manually juggle schedules to get the desired attendance.

Another nice feature of the video aspect of meetings or video calling is the ability to change your background when on a call, it allows you to blur it out or to use a preset background. If perhaps you haven’t got a professional area or you have no choice but to be in a busy area when making video calls this could help you feel more comfortable knowing other members of your team cant see where you are.

When joining a meeting you have created, enter your Calendar and click the meeting, a box with the option to ‘Join’ will come up, click Join and you will be taken directly into the meeting, another ‘Join now’ option is on the bottom right of the centre box you are then taken directly to the meeting.

If you are the one invited to a meeting you will receive a calendar invite via Email, if you already have Teams then you will receive a direct link.

If you don’t have Teams already then once you press the direct link, you will be directed to a screen offering you three options, the options are; ‘Download the Windows app’ will use the desktop app for your meeting and will require a download, ‘Continue on this browser’ means there is no downloads or installation required for you to take part in your meeting, and ‘Open your Teams app’ for if you already have the Teams app it will take you directly to your meeting.

Some of the preset backgrounds can be fun to play around with also, perhaps making a meeting or call less formal.

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