Microsoft Teams Training: Improving Your Meetings with Microsoft Teams
It’s time to improve upon your Microsoft Teams collaboration. Microsoft Teams has a number of features that can be used to improve upon your meetings and your collaboration. But sometimes you might need additional Microsoft Teams training to fully take advantage of the features that are available.
Here’s a general overview of how to use Microsoft Teams for meetings.
Begin by Scheduling the Meeting
First ,you need to decide what type of meeting you’re having: ad-hoc, private, or channel. Ad-hoc meetings will create an instantaneous meeting with the people you select, while private meetings will help you meet one-on-one with specific employees, and channel meetings will meet with everyone in a specific channel. Once you’ve decided the type of meeting, you can either launch it directly or schedule it for later.
You can schedule meetings in MS Teams or through Outlook. Either way, participants will be notified that they have a meeting to attend.
Connect Via Audio or Video
Depending on the type of meeting you’re holding, voice-only or video-only meetings may be better. If you’re relying on visual aids, or really need to connect one-on-one with those participating, a video meeting is probably better. A voice-only meeting is usually best for routine meetings and brief meetings, or if there may be those who don’t have the bandwidth for video.
Pay Attention to the Sound
There’s nothing worse than a poorly connected audio conference. Perform a mic check before you host your meeting, and make sure anyone with background noise mutes their mic. Otherwise, it can become distracting very quickly. If you’re going to be using video conferencing, check your webcam and your lighting too. The more brightly lit an area is, the better video will usually perform.
Invite and Admit Attendees
When you need to invite people who aren’t inside of your organization, they will be held in a lobby until you need them. You can invite them when you schedule or launch your meeting, and then wait for them to connect. Prepare anything you need beforehand, and then admit the attendees. They will then be brought into the conference.
This makes for a more effective meeting, as you can easily invite people from outside your organization, such as vendors, clients, investors, and more. Invitees will be able to set their name and photo, so you know who you’re speaking to and can communicate with them directly.
Use Application Sharing
Application sharing makes it easy to show your screen or just a single application on your screen. If you need to show attendees certain things on your computer, turn on application sharing.
This is great for things like showing PowerPoint videos, engaging in Microsoft Teams training sessions, and troubleshooting issues that employees may have. Those who are attending the meeting may be able to take control of application sharing as well, if they have information that you need, or if they need to take over part of the meeting from you.
Application sharing is particularly useful for training sessions, as there are some things that just aren’t easy to express in terms of slide shows or documentation. Share only a single window at a time to protect yourself from potential privacy and security issues.
Use Interactive Troubleshooting
Microsoft has come a long way from Clippy. Microsoft’s Interactive Troubleshooting feature will try to troubleshoot issues that you encounter before they become a problem. As an example, it will detect if you appear to be trying to talk, but you’re muted. This will vastly reduce the chances that you might need to redo your meetings.
While interactive troubleshooting can’t catch all your issues, it can catch most of the common ones. If you aren’t able to broadcast your video or audio cleanly, you’ll be notified – so you never have to wonder again whether everyone could see or hear you.
Review Your Analytics After the Meeting
Your analytics will tell you how the meeting performed, in terms of quality. After the meeting is complete, take a look. You may find that certain employees aren’t connecting well enough, and you may need to troubleshoot this moving into the future.
If your analytics show that everyone connected had issues, the issues could be on your side. You may need to look into your bandwidth or your system, to correct for the next meeting.
Leveraging Microsoft Teams for Your Next Meeting
Once you know how to use Microsoft Teams for meetings, it may become an important part of your business processes. Microsoft Teams meetings can be used for daily touch base meeting sessions, interviews, connecting with clients and investors, and holding engaging, online training sessions. Microsoft Teams is a versatile method of connecting through video, audio, or text, and can be used at all levels of collaborative process.
With Microsoft Teams, you’ll be able to swiftly connect with both those inside of your organization and outside of your organization. A stable, reliable platform, MS Teams makes connecting with people easier than ever.
Are you ready to start improving your meetings with Microsoft Teams? Download our ebook or contact Red River today.
