Tips for Safe & Productive Online Meetings & Collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Remote and hybrid work has become the new normal for many businesses worldwide, and day-to-day collaborations have shifted to the virtual world. Whether you’re hosting a virtual town hall, carrying out a daily group or 1:1 discussions, sharing documents, or even co-authoring a document in real-time, you need to collaborate safely and effectively. That’s where Microsoft Teams comes in. Here are five tips and safety techniques to support you in running secure online meetings with Microsoft Teams.

Tip #1: Adjust Pre-Meeting Settings

Schedule and organize meetings effectively by utilizing the Meeting Options tool to assign presenter permissions, allow attendees to bypass the lobby, automatically record, enable/disable chats, control reactions, and much more! To access these options, simply go to your Teams calendar and select the meeting. Then, click on “Meeting Options,” and a pop-up window with all the options will appear at the top right of the page. You can also access this in your Outlook calendar by finding “Meeting Options” under the “Meeting” tab.

Tip #2: Minimize Disruptions by Using In-Meeting Controls

Don’t let disruptions, like a noisy eater with an unmuted mic or an unwanted attendee’s video, derail your meeting. Meeting organizers can keep meetings productive by using the in-meeting controls feature. For example, if an attendee happens to leave their microphone unmuted and it is causing some distracting background noise, you no longer must stop and ask everyone to “go on mute.” Instead, you can quickly mute that participant’s mic yourself. Suppose you host a large meeting led by designated speakers, such as a town hall or lecture. In that case, you can mute all attendees and ensure your presenters won’t be accidentally interrupted. You can also remove unwanted attendees from meetings altogether. You can find these in-meeting controls by opening up “more actions” or the ellipses next to the attendee’s name and selecting the action needed.

Tip #3: Create A Private Channel

Sometimes you need to share sensitive information to only specified team members within a larger team, such as project details or strategic planning, that doesn’t require holistic team protection. Rather than creating a new team, you can create a private channel within an existing team that is only accessible to designated members. This is a great way to provide a security layer to protect sensitive business information without creating a new team.

Tip #4: Remove One-Time Participants

There may be times when you invite a guest speaker to your weekly team meeting, but you do not want that one-time participant to have access to the rest of your meeting series, especially when you want the contents of that meeting and chat kept internal afterward. You can prevent one-time participants from accessing future meetings and chat by removing them from your Teams calendar or Outlook calendar participants list. Double-click the meeting you are trying to manage and remove the participant from the list by clicking the “X” next to their name. Once removed, they will still be able to access all meeting information and chat history from when they were included in the meeting but will not see anything new.

Tip #5: End Your Meetings For All Participants

Instead of waiting for all the participants to leave the meeting on their own, you can wrap up the meeting for everyone by ending the meeting for all. Sometimes, participants will stay in a meeting room following the meeting because they were unaware that the meeting had concluded, or they may be communicating with co-workers on topics aside from the meeting’s content. To end the meeting for all participants, click the drop-down button next to the Leave option and choose End meeting.

We hope that these Microsoft Teams tips will help you be more productive and efficient while hosting your Teams meetings. We have more Teams tips and tricks on our blog. If you’re interested in learning more about Office 365 Integrations, give GTS a call at (904) 606-6011 or email info@helpgts.com. Our team is ready to help! <span style=”display:none”>Tips for Online Meetings</span>