Use Your Outlook Calendar on Microsoft Teams

Collaboration is vital in the operations of any business in today’s digitally-driven world. Employees today are being tasked to beat tight project deadlines, exceed customer expectations, and deliver on-demand tasks. They shouldn’t struggle to effectively coordinate schedules and connect over corporate networks across multiple time zones.

Microsoft Teams is a collaborative communications app built for small and large businesses designed to enhance team impact and streamline communications. Microsoft Teams offers more than just an automatic cloud-syncing to files and Office 365 tool integration. It also features a variety of tools to improve communication and increase productivity between employees, such as video and audio calls, text chats, file sharing functionality, online shift records, and shared calendars.

When it comes to workstream collaboration applications, shared calendars are vital. Team members need to know who’s working on a particular project, when and where to schedule meetings effectively, and when projects are due.  

The Microsoft Teams app has one main calendar that’s assigned to your entire group or organization. Its calendar functionality helps boost collaboration and productivity by allowing group members to create meetings directly in the Teams app, specify details about the meeting, and add other members. This way, they are notified about the conference and have it added and synced to their personal Microsoft Teams calendar. Other employees can also be added to calendar events or meetings if they’re required to attend.

Microsoft Teams makes it easy. Here’s how to schedule a meeting on your MS Teams calendar

• Open the Microsoft Teams app.
• Select Calendar.
• Click New Meeting.
• Choose the appropriate time zone from the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.
• Type in a name for your meeting in the Add title field.
• In the Add required attendees field, type in the people’s names that you want to be notified of the event.
• Specify the start and end time for your meeting.
• Click Does not repeat to open a menu and make the meeting a regular event if it needs to be recurring.
• Click Add channel if your meeting is specific to a particular category within your company’s Microsoft Teams setup.
• Next is the Add Location field to specify which conferencing tool will be used for the meeting.
• Fill in the meeting’s description: the agenda or send out a message to the attendees.
• Click Send to send out the invite.

The Scheduling Assistant that is shown when creating a meeting on Microsoft Teams is an alternative way of creating and editing sessions. It offers a more visual user interface that displays the options down the left side of the screen and lets you select the time with your mouse, and automatically makes the changes to your schedule.

It is essential to know that when you schedule an appointment or meeting in Outlook, it shows up in Microsoft Teams and vice versa. This, however, doesn’t mean that any scheduled appointment on Outlook automatically offers a way to join a Teams meeting. It is common to ensure you have an online meeting space, and you want to schedule appointments in Teams, not Outlook.

Now that we’re familiar with setting up a meeting in Microsoft Teams, we may find it inconvenient to juggle the different calendars we have in both Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.

We have good news; you don’t have to do that.

You can use your Microsoft Team’s ability to set up a video call inside of your Outlook.

Check out our latest Tuesday Tech Tip video to learn how to set up this feature :

• Open your calendar inside of Outlook

• At the top-right corner of your screen, you will see a Meet Now button.

• Click on it 

This allows you to set up a video call inside of teams using the Outlook calendar.

It helps you to work quicker, saves you time, and makes things more proficient and easier.