Microsoft team is an amazing unified collaboration tool and one of its many features includes conference calling. 1UC offers a huge array of training courses around Microsoft 365 and we have decided to share this basic quick start guide to using Teams conference calling to help all of you who may be new to working for home.
A brief video guide that walks you through these functions is available on our Youtube channel and below.
Getting started and setting up Microsoft Teams for the first time.
Teams is part of the Microsoft 365 suite that can be accessed though office.com or downloaded to the desktop application.
You can use teams through a web browser however, to get the best experience, we strongly recommend downloading the teams application.
To download Teams you first need to access the online version of teams.
- Click on the Teams icon.
- Once teams has opened, click on the download icon in the bottom left hand corner. This will download the desktop application.
- When its finished downloading, click on the file to start the installation. You won’t need to run through a wizard.
The teams desktop app will open automatically.
Scheduling a meeting
There are a couple of different ways you can schedule a Teams meeting.
- Scheduling a meeting using the Teams plug in within outlook is by far the easiest and quickest way to setup a new teams meeting.
To do this open your calendar in Outlook. Inside the calendar there will be a plugin for teams meetings. Clicking this will bring up an invite with all the join information automatically added.
This can also be done by clicking on the day and time, you wish to schedule the meeting first and then click the plugin.
You can then give your meeting a title, add the email addresses for the people you would like to join the meeting and check the time and date is correct.
If you click on meeting options, an internet window will appear where you can choose which people can bypass the lobby and who can present in the meeting.
Once you’ve saved your selection, close the internet window and we’ll be returned back to our calendar invite.
Hit send when you’re ready.
Schedule using Teams Calendar
If you don’t have outlook, you can still use the teams desktop app to easily schedule teams meetings. The process is very similar to scheduling a meeting in Outlook.
- In the Teams application, click on the calendar icon on the left hand side. This will open your Teams calendar.
- In the top right-hand corner there is a button to schedule a new meeting, clicking this will open a new invitation.
There will be several options to tailor your invite, such as;
- Title your meeting
- Invite participants
- Set a time and date for the meeting
- Set frequency of meeting
- Invite a whole channel
- Add a location
In the main body of the message will be a ‘Join’ link to the meeting but this will only appear after the invite is sent.
Meet Now
Teams also gives the option to quickly start a meeting. In the top righthand corner of the calendar next to schedule a meeting is an option to ‘Meet now’.
This allows you to jump straight into a meeting and invite people once the meeting has started. Once inside the meeting you will be brought to the below page. To invite people you need to type the name of the person you want to invite and click on their name when it appears.
The process to start a meeting or join a meeting is exactly the same. You can join a meeting from within the Teams calendar or from the outlook invitation.
- Joining from Teams Calendar
Locate the meeting in your calendar and open the invite. Click the join button in the top right-hand corner to enter the meeting.
Joining from email invitation
Locate the email with the join link and click the hyperlink that says, “join Microsoft teams meeting” this will automatically open the Teams application and bring you into the meeting.
When you join a meeting, you will be brought to this screen:
Participating in a call as a guest or host
When you join a meeting, you will be brought to this screen:
This screen allows you to set your audio and video settings before entering the meeting,
These icons allow you to:
- Turn camera on or off
- Blur background of camera (if turned on)
- Mute or unmute microphone
This will be dependant on what device you currently have plugged in/selected.
Selecting this button will open your device settings for audio and video.
- From here we can check to make sure we have the correct mic and speaker selected. Here we have the audio settings set to use our Jabra headset and therefore speak and microphone have both been set to Jabra.
- At the bottom is a list of cameras that can be used to stream your video for the meeting. This will only appear if you have a webcam device connected.
When you are ready, click ‘Join Now’
There is so much more to Microsoft 365 but we hope you have found this basic guide to getting started helpful. We offer training on Microsoft 365 and many other Unified Communications technologies.
Please feel free to contact us for more information.
