Ignite Live blog: MTG10 – Get the most out of meetings with Microsoft Teams

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

Speakers

James Skay  - Microsoft; Pauli Kongas  - KONE

 

At this session, James Skay - Senior Product Marketing Manager in Microsoft, covered the best practices regarding the Teams meetings – different types of meetings and when to use what, as well as getting familiar with a meetings lifecycle, in order for to users to get the maximum from their meetings experience.

 

The session begins with a great overview on how the meetings are driven in todays working environment in majority of the organization, and how Microsoft Teams can enable users being more effective during those meetings. Let’s start with the types of meetings which are held in companies:

meetings type.png

Most of the meetings are scheduled and planned some time before the meetings happens. Other meetings are Ad Hoc which means that there is no prior plan, but the users choose to spontaneously meet. The third type of the meetings are Channel meetings which are also scheduled meetings, and are planned for the team members to join in a certain channel (ideally used in day to day work of a small groups). And, and the end we have Live Events which are a great way to host a webinar or have an online event with a large number of audience.

 

In this session, James focuses on Scheduled meetings and dives deep into how these meetings are structured in the meaning of the three stages lifecycle:

  • Before the meeting – when we are getting prepared for the meeting;
  • During the meeting – everyone has the voice to collaborate;
  • After the meeting – very important stage which many people may miss, since there is always a rush for another meeting or a project task.

new approach.png

But, Microsoft Teams offers really good approach enabling users to have highly effective meetings. In Teams the people can collaborate before the meeting, share the information, documents, ask questions and get very well prepared. During the meeting, users can collaborate with each other from any location and still have the quality of the meeting as they are in the same room. They can share notes, co-author documents, use Microsoft Whiteboard and access the reach content within the app. What happens after the meeting in the channel is enabling users to go through the meeting content any time, files which were shared during the meeting, meeting notes which were taken, if a meeting was recorded they can view the recording and they can also view the history of the chat which happened during the meeting. Live captions are one more feature that users can enjoy following the meeting and presentation.

 

When you are sharing a presentation with your team members during the meeting, you can choose to allow users to skip ahead, or you can lock down the presentation so you can have full control what people are seeing.

 

Joining the Teams meeting from a mobile device is very fast and easy. When there is a meeting in a progress, you will have a Join button at the upper part of the screen. James had a great demo on how to join a meeting from the mobile app, how to share a screen or application, upload a PowerPoint presentation and add more attendees to the meeting.

Regarding the channel meetings, you can choose to hit the meet-now button and all of the users which have alerts for the channel, will get notification that there is a meeting in progress and they can join. But, if you choose to schedule a meeting, you can do that in the channel, and choose the channel name in order for the users to have clear view and information on where the meeting is going to be held (and easier search and find the content after the meeting).

On the second part of the session, there was also very great information covered on Whiteboard.

 

microsoft whiteboard.png

The Whiteboard enables users to transform a real picture or physical whiteboard into editable digital ink structure. They can use eraser to erase some content and collaborate like they are on a real physical whiteboard. It is digital by nature and it is saving automatically. The users can share it with just one touch and use reactions (as thumbs up – recently implemented option). Whiteboard can be launched in the meeting and users can contribute with just one touch. The great thing about the Whiteboard is that the user can choose with which people the Whiteboard is going to be shared: with the whole team, or just a couple of team members. The users can also create as many Whiteboards as they need.

This session included a customer case, which was presented by Pauli Kongas from KONE. This organization is a global leader in elevator and escalator business, has more than 57.000 employees and communicates with more then 450.000 customers. KONE organization is actively using Microsoft Teams app as a collaboration tool in their day-to-day team collaboration and chat communication and they are especially using Teams meetings feature. During just one day in this organization, there are more then 150.000 messages exchanged within the Teams application, where people from over 60 countries are communicating in one centralized place. They have also close to 1 million meetings a year in Microsoft Teams, which I can say that it is a pretty great number. They are usually posting the meetings agenda before the meeting, as well as some document files, so the team members can get ready and contribute more during the meeting. KONE organization is also using Whiteboard, so during the workshops everyone can contribute to the meeting by drawing the ideas.

At the end, James Skay closed this session with a great slide on 10 reasons why to host your meetings in Microsoft Teams:

why teams.png

You may check the video and demo of this session here.

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