Get Started with the New Microsoft Teams!

0:00You can see that I'm starting off in the Microsoft 365 portal here because Microsoft Teams is one of your Microsoft 365 apps. Now if you're not familiar with this portal, I bet you are familiar nevertheless with using Outlook through a web browser, and if that does look familiar to you then look. Click the little Waffle button up at the top left-hand corner there, that's where you get to your other Microsoft 365 apps, including Microsoft Teams. So wherever you are in the Microsoft 365 portal, just click the Waffle and you can get to Microsoft Teams.

0:30Now the reason why I am starting here is because we made quite a thing about saying, "This skill is all about the new Teams." And as I start the Teams app through the portal, it's going to tell me, "Your org is switching to the new Teams, and it's ready for you to see." So this classic versus new even applies to the web-based interface, to the browser-based version of the app. So I'm going to say to myself, "Yes, I'm happy to switch to the new Teams. Let me switch now to the new Teams." It's going to load that through the browser. Now what we will see shortly is that you can use Microsoft Teams either through the browser or through the desktop app.

1:04It is very much your choice, and in a second you will see that it does look extraordinarily similar. So this is the new Teams through the browser. Hold that thought for a second. What I'm going to do down on the taskbar, I've got an old shortcut here to Microsoft Teams. Now that happens to be an old shortcut to the classic Microsoft Teams, but look what happens when I click it. As I do that to open the desktop application, it says, "Oh, you've been using the new Teams. Do you want to switch back to the classic one?" No, I'm going to keep using the new Teams. Thank you very much.

1:34Now I do appreciate that by the time you get to use the new Teams experience, it might not be that new. So you might not get this discussion about classic versus new. But I just wanted to prove the point to you that this is how Teams is going to look through the desktop application. And if I just switch back to the browser just here, particularly if I hide the tabs, well you'll see that it does look extraordinarily similar. That's through the browser. That's through the app. It really is very, very similar. I have no problem if in real life you end up preferring to use it through the browser, but just be aware that throughout the rest of these skills, I will be using the app-based experience rather than the browser.

2:13So down the left-hand side, you would have spotted I'm sure this navigation bar which will enable you to go to the different parts of Microsoft Teams. So whether it's looking at your chats or your calendar or making calls and what not, and you might have some other things shown along here as well depending on what your organization has set up. So you can see here there's the opportunity for you or your IT folks to actually add other apps to that bar. But we're going to be focusing on the most obvious parts of Microsoft Teams starting with the Teams bit of Teams. So let's talk about the structure of Teams and channels.

2:46Now the idea is a team is a group of people who gather to get something done in your organization. So that might be a department or it might be a project team for example, or if you are a small organization then you might just have one team which could be the whole company. So what you'll see for me in the Teams part of Teams, I've got a number of Teams, I've got a US sales team, here I've got a market project team team, I've got a design team, a communications team, and you can see as you click the little triangle to expand or collapse, it will reveal this sub-level underneath and these are the channels.

3:20So Teams are made up of channels which is where the conversations that you have in that team actually happen. And generally a channel is dedicated to a particular topic, or if you do just have one great big team for the whole organization then maybe you would have a separate channel for each department or for each project. So it doesn't really matter how you use the hierarchy of Teams and then channels, but just be aware that within a team you have this sub-level which is channels and generally a team will be a group of people or a project team and then these channels will be different topics.

3:52So you can see here in, I don't know, let's go to, yeah, this sales west channel, when I'm clicked on that it'll show me all of the conversations going on in that channel. You'll see that I can add a reaction to a post that's already there or I can reply to an existing post or of course start a new post, but note that any conversations that are happening in a channel as part of a team will be visible to all of the members of that team. So whatever I post in this sales west channel, everybody who is a member of the US sales team will get to see it.

4:22And if that makes you nervous, if you think you're so whole, who is in that team, who is going to see it, then to see the members of a team, just click on this more options button next to the team there and choose the option to manage team. And then you can see, yes, there are two owners of this particular team. They're the ones that have got superpowers, but if I expand this, then you can see that there are other members of the US sales team as well, including of course me and a few other, you know, demo accounts there. So that's the assumption you should go with. Any post that you put into a channel conversation will be visible to the whole team.

4:54Except for, let me just find the example as after. There we go. Except for where there's a private channel. So can you see this future plans channel here, which is a channel in the design team? It's got a padlock next to it. That means only a subset of the team members can see that channel. It's a private channel. And we'll talk more about that another time. But if you don't see the padlock, then yes, absolutely you should assume that everybody who's member of that team can see that conversation. As opposed to a chat. So if you look on the left hand side there, you can see we've got chats and chats are those conversations that you have with specific people outside of a channel.

5:32And you might call this a DM, you know, a direct message or a PM, a private message. So you can see here I'm having a chat with Lalo and it's only a chat with Lalo and nobody else. It's a conversation that's happening outside of the channel. And you'll also notice that you can do your calling through teams as well. So again, using the navigation down the left hand side, if I click on calls and I'm betting that you've had a go at this or I'm hoping you've had a go at this for internal people to your organization. So if I wanted to have a voice or a video call with Lalo, then I can absolutely do that.

6:03And of course, all of this functionality we will look at in more detail as we progress. But just as your quick overview, I could do that. And maybe, just maybe, depending on the licenses that your organization has purchased, maybe you can actually type in a regular telephone number and call it. And if that's the case, then you would actually have a number pad here that you could click the numbers on rather than typing it in like I did. But look, for my demo environment, I can't complete the call because you need a special extra calling license in order to be able to dial regular phone numbers outside of the individuals within your organization.

6:36So that will depend on exactly what licenses your organization has purchased. And then finally, you will see the calendar in the navigation bar at the left hand side here. So this is where you'll be scheduling your team's meetings and you'll be joining your team's meetings. And it does synchronize perfectly with your Outlook calendar, but more on that later. So of course, top right hand corner, you'll see I've got the option here to create a brand new Teams meeting. I could do that. Or of course, if I've already got meetings in the calendar, which are online meetings like this weekly call with subsidiary leads here, then of course, I can join the Teams meeting from there.

7:13But there is more. So we tend to think of Microsoft Teams as being group conversations, you know, channel conversations, private conversations and calling. But we've also got other ways of collaborating. So if in the Mark 8th Project team, I go to the Research and Development channel, what you will see is these different tabs across the top here. So the posts tab, that's where you'll see all of the channel conversations that everybody in the channel can read and contribute to. The next tab along will show you all of the files that have been shared in that channel.

7:46But there are other tabs you can add as well. And this is just a couple of examples to give you some ideas. So look at this. I've got spend analysis. If there's a particularly important spreadsheet that everybody in that channel needed regular access to, then you could actually put the Excel spreadsheet using Excel on the web here on a tab in Teams. So we don't even have to leave Teams in order to look at and interact with that spreadsheet. And the next tab along, look, I've got a project plan here. So this is using Microsoft Planner where we can schedule and categorize tasks and even interact with it and assign tasks to people all again within the Teams interface.

8:22And if your organization does use things like Power BI, well, again, we can start embedding Power BI reports into Microsoft Teams. Let me just flip to a different page here. I mean, it's amazing. All of this, keep it within Microsoft Teams. So the people who need to look at this information can all stay within the same interface. They don't need to remember where these reports live or need different logins or whatever. It's all there at their fingertips within this example, the Research and Development channel. And finally, in this quick tour video, one of the show-stopping reasons why people are loving the new Teams, myself included, is the ability, look at the top right here, to easily switch between different Teams accounts.

9:04So you can see that I'm currently showing you my demo account here. You can see there are the long, obscure demo tenant address there. That's my demo account that I'm going to be using to show you how this functionality works. But also, I'm signed into my live CBT Nuggets account as well at the same time. So I can switch between these accounts and I've got another demo account here. And I can add other accounts as well if I need to. And you can set different statuses for your different accounts. So I can set myself as a way or do not disturb for my work account so that real -life colleagues don't try and talk to me while I'm trying to record a demo.

9:38Fantastic! But actually, while we are up here at the top right-hand corner, if you click on this "more" button, that's where you can get into settings to control how Teams behaves. And also, if you needed to, for whatever reason, revert back to the classic Teams, then that's where you could switch off the new Teams. Wow! So, there's a functionality there, all brought together in a single application . It really does make Teams your first port of call for the work that you're doing with your co-workers. And over the next few videos and the next few skills, we're going to learn more .

0:00In this video, we're going to take a look at the most obvious functionality of the messaging parts of teams. So that's posting messages into a channel or having a private chat. And you might be surprised to know that there is an awful lot more we could say about this, but in this video I just want to give you the fast track, if you like, for the essentials. So we'll start off with posting a message into a channel. So you'll remember that a channel is the sub-level under a team, and you will also notice in terms of unread content in a channel, well, that's what the bold means.

0:31So you can see there's unread content in these particular channels that have got bold in. Where there's the red counter, that means that I have been alerted in some way. So if I have a look at that particular channel, you can see that there is this unread message here from Lalo. You can see it says Last Red, and also he has mentioned me. That's why there was a red counter there before I actually looked at it. In terms of those red counters though, it's a bit different for the private chats. So looking at the navigation bar at the left-hand side, the private chats will show you the red counters for any unread messages, because obviously if it's a private chat, it's kind of like you have already been at mentioned by default, if you like, because our messages sent to you.

1:10And the activity section just here with the 15 in the red counter there, that is summarizing all activity across all of your channels and whatnot as well. But anyway, let's go back to that channel and that research and development example. So yes, we can see that Lalo has put a post in this channel and you'll see that I can react to it. So let's give him a thumbs up there. There we go, that's the reaction that I have just posted. And you will also see that because he has mentioned me, maybe I should reply to acknowledge that. So I can just click reply here.

1:41And it is really important to click reply rather than start a new post to reply to Lalo's post. So we're going to reply so that all of those replies are threaded with the original post. So let me just click reply and say, good idea. And if I want to @ mention someone, so let's @ mention James for example. There we go. And if I want to make it a bit more informal, I could actually delete his surname and say, can you let your team know as well. And because this is a reply, it's probably going to be a much shorter message than a whole brand new post.

2:12So when you press enter with a reply, it will actually post it. It will actually submit it if you like. So you can see there's that reply that I have just posted. But if I want to start a brand new post of my own, then obviously that's this button down the bottom here. And I suppose I should mention actually that newest posts will appear at the bottom of the list. So if you scroll up, you'll see the older posts and the starting of a new post is the button down here. But if your mind works the other way around, if you'd rather have the new post button at the top and have the newest posts at the top of the list rather than at the bottom of the list, that is actually an option you can set in settings.

2:46So do have a browse through settings to see if there's certain behaviors that might suit you better. But anyway, this is the default. It works okay for me, so I shall keep that. So we're going to start a new post of our own. But let's just look at Lalo's example. You'll notice that he marked it as important. He also had like a little heading, a title, and then he had some text that was formatted. It was bold. He's got some bullets. He's got a link. You know, that's quite a nicely formatted post. So let's start one of our own. And you will see that my cursor is blinking ready to add a subject line, much like Lalo's example that we saw.

3:18If you don't want to add a subject line, just press tab a couple of times. That'll take your cursor straight down into the body of the message. So let's imagine I just want to quickly put some text in there and I've already got something on my clipboard. So let me just paste that in. And you will also see that it will highlight your spelling mistakes for you with the red wiggly underline, which I think is pretty much the standard, isn't it? So let me just right click and say, "Ah, I actually meant this quarter." And I can use these formatting tools to apply the usual formatting, so no great surprises there. I can add a bulleted list like we saw in Lalo's example.

3:50I can add a link. I can mark it as important so you can see all of those options just there. If you change your mind halfway through the post and you want to abandon it, then that's what the little trash can is just up here. A couple of other options down the bottom here, for example, adding an attachment and whatnot. But I think that will do just for our first example, so let me go ahead and post that into the channel. And then what I'm going to do, from a screen that you can't see, so off camera, I'm logged in as Lalo through a browser window. So as Lalo, I'm going to go ahead and give a thumbs up to that particular post.

4:20So you can see the notifications come in on my screen from my account there. You can see there's the response that Lalo put. And let's imagine Lalo wants to send a quick reply. So from the screen that you can't see, he's just going to put a little reply there. So when he sends that, we should see that reply pop up. Good on that post there. Excellent. Now when it comes to deleting or editing your posts, the default behavior is that you can edit and delete just your own posts. So if I change my mind about this post, then you'll see I've got a couple of options.

4:51I could edit it. That's what the little pencil is there for. Or if I click the More Options button, I've got a few other options, including being able to delete that post. Now just be aware that if you do delete it, sure, the original post will get deleted, but any comments by other people or even yourself will stay. So I would have to contact Lalo and say, "Could you just delete your reply?" because it looks a bit stupid because you've got to reply there with no original post. So bear that in mind. If you realize it does look stupid, then yes, you can see we can undo. But now let's take a look at those private chats.

5:23So we can see that there are five unread conversations going on in that part of Teams. We've got two new activities that have gone on in the activity feed there, and that is Lalo's reply and also Lalo's reaction. And I don't know if you noticed that the little counter there on the taskbar is also updating to show the total number of alerts or notifications that we need to be aware of. So that five there is reflecting the five private chats that I have yet to look at. And as you might expect, the five is reflecting the number of bold chats gone on here that haven't been looked at.

5:55But let's take a look at this chat from Lalo and just do a quick example. So you can see that yesterday I messaged Lalo about, "Shall we grab a coffee and maybe a piece of cake?" So these chats are what we call persistent. It'll show your conversation with that person or people because we can add extra people to a chat. It doesn't have to be just one to one. You know, we can add extra people if we want to. But it'll be persistent. It'll be your conversation with that person or people since the beginning of time. It's not just a temporary today's chat or anything like that.

6:25Now, I can see visually that Lalo is online but he's away. That's what that yellow indicator is meaning. And as I hover over his little profile picture there, I get to see that, yes, he last looked at this chat two hours ago. I can also see his working hours and what time zone he is in. And that's going to be really important for those of us who do work with people all over the world. And also I get to see his status message. So it's saying here that he's working from home. He's got a broken foot and I can see his full message. Now that information, that status message and the online status, well, that is controlled through what we call the account manager.

7:01So top right hand corner. If I wanted to change my online presence and my status, I would do that from here. So I'm currently showing as available. I could change that to away or whatever. And I could also set the status message. That's where Lalo set the status broken foot working from home or whatever it was. And as I alluded to in the last video, you can have different online presence for the different accounts. So yes, I'm online for this demo account. That's great. Now, I'm trying to have a private chat with Lalo here, but I can see that he's away. He's not available right now.

7:33And in the last video, I did say, you know, you can revert back to classic teams, but why would you want to? Well, there is actually a little feature that I used to really like in classic teams that hasn't yet at the time of recording made its way to new teams. And that is the ability to be notified when Lalo does become available. I'm sure that feature will come, but if you have a look for it in your environment, click the little more options button next to the person's name. And I'm hoping that at some point you'll see an option in this list here that says notify when Lalo becomes available. But anyway, let's imagine that Lalo is now available.

8:05So just on my other screen as Lalo, I'm going to change his status so that he is no longer away, but he is available. We should see the little green check mark there. And let's imagine I give him a little bit of a nudge. You know, so are we going to have this cup of coffee or what? So I send him a quick message. He, of course, can then reply to that. So let me just reply as Lalo. We can see from these little blob things just here that Lalo is typing a message. So let me just send that message from other screen as Lalo. And you can also see this little notification here, but underneath it's got some suggested responses.

8:37So I can just quickly send a little pre-prepared response there. So yeah, great. That's a private chat. As with posting a message into a channel, you'll see down the bottom here that I can add an attachment. And I've got a couple of other options for emojis and other fun stuff and what not. But just take note of this option here. Setting delivery options, marking a message as important, or even pestering the person every couple of minutes with a message. I have opinions about this. I have to say, somebody else's urgent message might not be urgent for me. And don't be surprised if this isn't available for you because this is something that can get switched off for your organization by your IT administrator.

9:14But that might be something worth exploring. And then finally in this video, just a quick word about notifications. So we saw the red counters. We can see the bold coloring for the channels that have got content we haven't yet looked at. And you saw the notifications popping up at the bottom right-hand corner when L alo private message me or when he liked one of my posts. So if you do take yourself into settings and choose notifications and activity, that's where you get to control exactly what notifications you get. And you're probably not going to know what's going to suit you best until you have been using teams for a while.

9:49You're going to get to know what annoys you and what doesn't. And for me personally, well, it was lovely that Lalo gave me a thumbs up for my post, but I didn't need to be disturbed with that information. So I'm going to change that to say, no, I don't want to ban her popping up. I don't even want it really showing in the activity feed. Let's switch off notifications for likes and reactions for my content. But that's just my personal preference. And also bear in mind if you need to, you can set notifications for individual channels. So let's imagine for this monthly reports channel, let me go into channel notifications.

10:21I do want to be notified for every new post in that channel for whatever reason . You know, it might be very important to channel for me. I want notifications for every new post in that channel. So you do get quite a bit of control as to how your notifications look. But there is more to know about channels and conversations and whatnot, but let 's not get to ahead of ourselves here. If you are new to teams, then I think that's more than enough to get you started.

0:00Let's take a closer look at the calls part of Microsoft Teams. So using the navigation bar on the left-hand side here, let me just go into calls. You already know from our quick tour video that you can just type in the name of somebody internal to your organization and call them. But it doesn't just have to be one person. You can have multi-people calls. These are two internal people here which I could then call. Also, as I said in that intro video, if your organization has purchased the licenses to enable you to call any old phone number, perhaps clients and people outside of your organization, then you will see a dial pad here to enable you to do that.

0:37You'll also see in the main body of the screen your history. And that means I can see incoming calls and outcoming calls and calls that were forwarded to voicemail and whatnot. And you can filter that history to only see the missed calls or the voicemails. And we will see an example of a voicemail later. And then over on the right-hand side, you've got your speed dial options. So this is where you could add a contact to speed dial or actually look from the history. Let's imagine, yes, John, I want to add to my speed dial, then I could use the more options button here to add him to my speed dial.

1:08Fill in a few other details from a contact point of view, but let me just click save and then he will appear over on the right-hand side here . So although in these demos, I will be using only the internal calling for other people within my organization. If, as I said, your organization has allowed you to be able to call people external to your organization, then you will probably find this contacts button useful up at the top right-hand corner. This is where you will get to see all of your contacts that have come over from your Microsoft Outlook contacts. So this is where you'll spot your clients with their actual real-life telephone numbers that you can then call from within teams.

1:44You can see the little telephone button there that isn't available because I don't have that capability enabled. But again, here you're able to add these other contacts to your speed dial, which you would then see as we just saw over on the right-hand side in the calls part of teams. But also, while we are here with this guy, look at the bottom left-hand corner this time, and this gives you shortcuts to some of the behaviors regarding calls. So at the moment, you can see any incoming calls for me do not get forwarded to voicemail, my computer will ring, and I can choose to answer that call, and we'll see an example of that later.

2:17But if I did want to have all calls forwarded straight to voicemail, then I could choose that option. And of course, if you go into more settings, that's the same places going to settings from up here, but it takes you straight to the calls part of settings. That's where you would set a few different options for how calls behave, such as recording or greeting for your voicemail and whatnot. But one last thing in our guided tour, this is where you'll also control what speakers and microphones get used. And again, as you might imagine, if you click the drop down there, you can change it to other speakers and microphones that it's detected on your system.

2:49And again, go into the device settings this time to actually choose specifically what speaker and microphone that you want to use. So that's fair enough for using calls from the calls part of Teams. But actually, what I love about Teams, there are lots of different ways to make a call. So if I am in, for example, the Research and Development channel, and I'm participating in this chat here, well look, there's a reply from Lalo. If I click on Lalo's little profile picture, I get to see buttons to enable me to initiate a video call or just a voice only call with Lalo directly from within here.

3:22I don't have to go into the calls part of Teams to start a conversation with L alo. Or if somebody's been at mentioned, like this James at mentioned here, again, I can click that or even just hover to start a video or a voice call with James. But anyway, let's try making an outgoing calls. So I can see here that I've got a missed incoming call from John. So I think, well, I better ring him back, so I'm going to do that there. But as we saw, there are lots of different ways of doing that. And when I click that, it's actually going to start a voice only call. I can tell that by the style of the icon there. It's just a handset rather than the video camera.

3:53So as I initiate that call, if I think to myself, well, actually, I would like this to be a video call. I can turn on my camera here while it's ringing. And John is signed in on my other desk just next to me. And I'm just wheeling across there on my wheelie chair, if you hear a funny noise, because I'm lazy. So I've just answered the call from John's point of view. You can see that John's camera is loading up. And you can see that I've got John's computer being manned by. Well, it's one of my dog's toys. I think that's supposed to be a fluffy dog hand puppet thing. But it's just the desk next to me. So you can see a similar background to the one from me.

4:24And there's me, the little miniature in the corner there. So me and John are now able to have this conversation. At any time, if I decide to turn off my camera, I've got the button there to switch that off. And it just changes to my little profile picture. I can switch it back on again at any time. I can click the drop down to change the camera that it uses, because sometimes you might realize, oh, I'm meant to be looking at this camera over here. So you can do that. And I can also blur the background. And we will talk a bit more about some of the other things that you can do whilst you're in a call like this when we talk about online meetings.

4:55Because actually, it's a fine line, isn't it? The difference between a video call and an online meeting. So you can see I've got the option to share content. But I'd like to come back to that when we do talk about online meetings. You'll see that I can invite other people to this call, because at the moment it's just me and John. But I could invite somebody else to the call if I wanted to. And you'll also see options to transfer the call to somebody else or put the person on hold. But let's leave that call now. So top right hand corner, I'm going to leave the call. And unsurprisingly, that will then show on my history as an outgoing call to John Manjoma.

5:26And if you ever want to tidy up this list of your history, then you can click that button there to remove an item from the view. Depends how you want to use the history. Now let's see how it looks when you receive an incoming call. So what I'm going to do is from a different computer that you can't see, I'm going to make a call to the computer that you can see from James Conrad. So I'm logged in as James Conrad on another computer. And I'm going to pretend that I'm working away in Excel and I don't want to talk to James. So we will see the call popping up in the bottom right hand corner. I am going to reject the call, because it's not going to automatically go to voicemail, because of the option that we set in Teams, I've got it currently set to don't forward to voicemail.

6:05So it is going to ring for a little bit. So I would have to reject it to make it go to voicemail. We will then hear James leave a voicemail message for me. That of course is then going to appear at some point. It'll take a few moments, but that will appear in my team's history here that I've got a missed incoming call from James and also a voicemail. So let's see all of that. You might hear a bit of fumbling as I switch between different computers and different microphones and whatnot, but let's see how it goes. So here I am working in Excel. So from my other computer where I'm logged in as James, I'm going to initiate a video call with me.

6:37So what you're seeing is the incoming call, there we go from James. I think to myself, ah, don't really want to talk to James. I could answer his voice only, rather than video if I didn't want to chat on video, but I'm going to reject the call. That means it's going to go to voicemail. - Is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone. - So that's the voicemail message James is hearing. - Yeah, we'll press the count key for more options. - Hi, Simona, it's James here. Can you give me a call when you're free? Thank you, bye bye. Now I should just hang up as James.

7:09Now you can see that the team's icon on the taskbar is flashing at the bottom there. So it's trying to tell me something. Sure enough, I've got a new entry in my history. So there was an incoming call from James that was forwarded to voicemail. If I have a look at that voicemail, you'll see the details over on the right-hand side there. And I love this. Look, it has transcribed that voicemail absolutely perfectly. I don't even have to listen to it, but if I do want to listen to it, then I can click the play button. Just here. - Hi, Simona, it's James here. Can you give me a call when you're free? Thank you, bye bye.

7:40- And you probably also saw the notification pop up in the bottom right-hand corner for the Outlook email. So you will also get notification of that voicemail popping up in your Outlook as an email message as well. So that does work really rather brilliantly. And it's so convenient because obviously I can call James back straight away from that details panel on the right-hand side, either with an audio call or a video call, or if like me, you're a little bit averse to actually making these voice and video calls and you prefer to have a text-based conversation, you can just send a quick message here.

8:10So sorry, I missed you. And what that'll do, it'll actually send that message, obviously text-based, but as a private chat. So if I now go into the chat part of Microsoft Teams, you'll see at the top of the list there, there's a private chat with James Conrad, that's a little message that I just sent to him from that voicemail details window. And look, I can even initiate a voice or a video call from this private chat. Just up here, I've got the audio call button or I can get the drop down to start a video call. And that's really useful actually, because sometimes you might be in a private chat with someone and it all gets a bit complicated, trying to discuss whatever it is you're discussing through a text-based conversation.

8:44Sometimes you might think, well, let's just actually talk about this in person. So I think it's really nicely integrated. So really, your key takeaways, what I would like you to do now in your own environment is take yourself into settings, either from the device settings or the call settings or just general settings up here and check that you've got the right devices being used for your audio and video calls. And also go into the calls category on the left-hand side here. Again, just check that the behavior matches what you would like it to do. But in particular, record a customized greeting for your voicemail, otherwise you will just have the standard electronic voice.

9:20But also take a look at this, manage your out of office voicemail. This means that when your outlook automatic replies are switched on, it can play a greeting so it can synchronize nicely with when you've told outlook that you're out of the office and having a message sent to everybody, you can manage your out of office voicemail in conjunction with that.

0:00There is a surprising amount to learn about the online meeting functionality in Teams, but in this video, in this Get Started skill, I want us to just try the basics of setting up an online meeting, inviting both internal and external people, attending the meeting and then sharing your screen while you're in it. And I'm going to try and squeeze all of that lot into about 10 or 12 minutes or so, and so we'll see how we go. But you already know from the Quick Tour video at the beginning of this skill that the online meeting functionality takes place in the calendar or you would schedule your online meetings in the calendar part of Teams.

0:32And also I think I mentioned that your Teams calendar will synchronize perfectly with your Outlook calendar. It's the same underlying calendar information. So if you just take a mental note of what you see here, so for example, on Tuesday the 5th, there's this weekly call with subsidiary leads, that's an online meeting. And if I go into Outlook for the same account and go into the calendar, there we go, Tuesday the 5th, weekly call with subsidiary leads, online meeting, it's the same calendar information. But it will look different, particularly if you like to use these color coded categories like the bright yellow and the blue and the green, those don't come through into Teams.

1:07But nevertheless, if there's an online meeting, you can join it either in Teams or in Outlook. So in Outlook, for example, you'd click the meeting and then up on the ribbon, you would choose the option to join the Teams meeting and then that would give the opportunity to go ahead and do that. If you prefer to do it from within Teams, it doesn't really matter, click the same meeting and choose join and it will take you to exactly the same joining window. But really what I wanted to do for us in this video is create a brand new meeting and of course we can do that by clicking the button at the top right hand corner and if you click that, you'll see you get to the opportunity to fill in a title of the meeting and add the attendees.

1:43But notice that you have to manually choose the appropriate date and time, which might not be too arduous, but as a bit of a shortcut, what I tend to prefer to do is to navigate to the day that I want to set the meeting up for. So let's say it's next Thursday and each of these gray blocks on the calendar represents half an hour. So if you click and drag or if you just want half an hour, just click. But let's say I want a meeting that's from 12 to 1 on that Thursday. So I'm going to click and drag over two blocks, two half hour blocks to make an hour, let go, that means it will automatically therefore have populated the appropriate date and time.

2:20So let's imagine I want a meeting for Christmas party planning and I'm going to invite some attendees. So let's invite a few internal people. So let's invite the usual demo accounts here. So I've got a few example accounts. So James and John and Lalo. Oops, I'm going to like a spell Lalo. But I'm also going to add an external person. So Nora Nugg at gmail.com is obviously somebody external to our organization because it's a gmail account. And I've particularly chosen a gmail account because Google is not part of the Microsoft world.

2:54And of course Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft product. So it's going to be interesting to see that an external person who isn't part of the Microsoft infrastructure can still join. So I will show you how this looks when Nora joins this meeting, but could I emphasize if you do need to invite people external to your organization to a Teams meeting, if it's a high profile meeting, maybe with a customer or a client, I strongly recommend you test in advance, just a little test meeting with the person just to check there aren 't any firewall problems and whatnot with regards to inviting that person who is external to your organization.

3:28But anyway, Christmas party planning, the subject's been filled in there. I can then add in a few notes and whatnot. So maybe down here I might want to say in fluent double Dutch, please bring your best party planning ideas. And you'll also notice that the default for me in my environment and probably will be for yours as well, is that this is going to be an online meeting, which means it's going to automatically populate the joining information and whatnot for the participants. If you don't want it to be an online meeting, then you would switch this option off. And there's other stuff we could fill in, but it's just the basics in this video. So let me send that meeting invitation on its way top right hand corner there.

4:02Good. So that meeting, that online meeting will now be in my calendar. And if I just click it to open it up, so if I click that pop out button to open it up, you will see that the online meeting joining information has been automatically added as I promised. So let's see how this looks from the point of view of people who are going to be joining this meeting. So I am logged in as Lalo through the browser on this window just here. So let me show you from Lalo's point of view. So what you'll see, there we go.

4:33This is Lalo's team's calendar. That meeting has already gone into his calendar. And if you wanted to click that to actually state whether he's going to attend or not, he could click the RSVP and choose to accept or decline or whatever. And he would also get that in his email. So there we go. Lalo's outlook through the web and sure enough, there's that same meeting invitation that, again, he could have RSVP to from within there. Now for the external user, so I'm logged in as, there we go.

5:04I'm logged in as Nora Nugget in her Gmail account just here. So you can see that she has indeed got that meeting invitation from me. She's got that same Microsoft Teams meeting information that she's going to click to join the meeting when the time comes. And yes, she is also going to accept that meeting invitation. Good. So it's all going well. Oh, and you can also see at the bottom right hand corner there my outlook notification that's telling me that Lalo has accepted that meeting invitation. Good. But now let's imagine it is now next Thursday. So gosh, time comes around quickly.

5:36And there's that meeting in my calendar. And it has changed in appearance because other people have already joined this meeting. So it's looking a bit different, isn't it? It's bold. It's got the join button much more prominently available. But before I do join it, there is one thing I want to show you. Let me just pop this out because it's the tracking at the left hand side that's interesting. So you saw me accept this meeting invitation on behalf of Lalo a second ago and the same with Nora Nugget. So they are showing as accepted. James and John didn't get round to actually saying whether they were coming or not.

6:07So it's showing as unknown. But as I said, other people have already joined this meeting. So let me go ahead and join it as well. So even though I was the organizer of the meeting, I didn't have to be there before the meeting could start. And what your notice is, well, there I am, a little preview there, you get to see your video and audio options before you actually join the meeting. And it will remember your last settings. So I think it must have been in the last video when we were doing voice and video calls. I chose the option, didn't I, to blur my background. So it's remembered that. And I think that's probably appropriate. You know, it's very likely you'll want the same option the next time.

6:38But if you wanted to join without your camera switched on, then you could switch it off here. And in fact, I am going to join muted. So without audio, just so I can get as little feedback from all these different computers logged into the same meeting in the same room. So I'm going to mute myself before I connect. But this of course is where you would make sure it's using the right microphone and speakers and whatnot before you do join. But anyway, let's go ahead and join and see who is already in the meeting. Let me maximize this. My goodness, I can see that John has joined the meeting. So there's the glove puppet dog toy thing that we've seen John logged in as before.

7:11And we'll also see that James has logged in and James is being manned by another of my dog stories, which is a teddy bear. So you can see those other two people are already joined. But what's of interest is this, Nora nugget, that external person, is waiting in the lobby. So this is very likely to be the default settings for your organization. Anybody external to your organization, like Nora, will have to wait in this lobby, which is just a holding area until we're ready to admit her. And from her point of view, this is what it looks like. So I'm logged in as Nora down here, aren't I?

7:42Yeah. So Nora clicked that link in the joining information in the email that we saw a second ago. And she went through the same options to turn her camera on and off and whatnot . And then it's saying this, we've let people in the meeting know that you're waiting. So she is now waiting for us to admit her. So let's put her out of her misery and say, yes, let's admit Nora. So I made sure that Nora's camera and microphone was switched off, so I don't get too much feedback. But you can see there are four of us in total in the meeting. Great. There are lots of options to explore across the top here, but I'm not going to go through them all in this video.

8:13This is just the basics that you probably will be turning your microphone on and off as you need to, turning your camera on and off as you need to. And the one thing that I did promise that we would look at was sharing your screen. So let's imagine I've got an Excel spreadsheet that I want to talk through in this particular meeting. You can see it here. I've already got it open. And I want to be able to share that through Teams. And if you're using Windows 11, then an easy way to do that is to just hover over the window on the taskbar there. Can you see it says, share this window?

8:44And if you then click, share this window and then say, share, that will share it through Teams. But if you're not using Windows 11, I'm going to have to show you another way anyway. So let me just go back to Teams and show you the other way. So back to that meeting. So if you click the Share button, and I have to say there's an awful lot in here. It's a bit mind blowing, but this is just the fast track video. So I strongly suggest when you need to share your screen, I say share your screen generally. It is just one application you want to share, isn't it? You don't want to share your whole computer because you've probably got tons of stuff open.

9:15So I strongly suggest that you go to the window category here. That will list all of the individual windows you've got open, including that Excel one that we already saw that I've got open. That's what I want to share. That means I'll be sharing that and that only, nothing else. So let me click that. And what you can see here is a red line around the edge of the window that you 're sharing. You can see at the very top here it says you're sharing your screen. And I've got the opportunity there to stop sharing once I've finished talking through this Excel spreadsheet or whatever it is.

9:46If I move my mouse up towards that little toolbar, I get a slightly expanded toolbar giving me more options. I'll leave you to explore that if you need to. And of course I've got the option to stop sharing once I've finished. But do have confidence that you're only sharing the bit that's got the red outline around the edge. And in fact, if I show you what this looks like from John's point of view, then you can see, yes, sure, he can see my spreadsheet and he's got a little summary of the people in the meeting down the right hand side as well. But anyway, let's imagine that I've finished sharing so I'm going to choose the option to stop sharing and it'll tumble me back into the meeting as we were.

10:21Once we've finished the meeting, I can just leave the meeting, big red button at the top right hand corner there, that will leave everybody else in the meeting. But if I want to end it for everybody, then click the drop down and choose the option to end the meeting and everybody will be booted out and the meeting will be over. So now you know how to set up an online meeting, join it and share your screen, which to be honest is all that many people ever need to know how to do. But there are many more options to explore but we will save that for another day.