Am I dim or is MS Teams infuriating?

In all honesty, I never create my Teams meeting from within Teams itself. I just use Outlook.

Calendar, New Teams Meeting button, set date/time, add people to the To field as I would for an email (so you can paste in a list, or add a DL etc)

^^ this. It didn’t even occur to me that I could do it in Teams, I’ve always just used Outlook.

Am I alone in thinking it needs a virtual toilet break flag?

Sitting on long calls all day makes it really hard to take a leak mid-call. If I was in the room, I’d just get up with the requisite nod.

Doesn’t really work online in a Teams meeting without video. But if no-one knows that you are away from your desk you can still get asked a question, to which there is a tumbleweed moment followed by the inevitable chorus of ‘You’re on mute’ ‘Are you still there?’ ‘We can’t hear you’ etc etc etc

Maybe I should just use a bottle under the desk… But a little ‘Away’ flag would be way more civilised, and better than dialling off and dialling back in again.

Am I alone in thinking it needs a virtual toilet break flag?

There’s a Back Soon (I cant remember the exact words I’m down stairs on my lunch break) yellow light status option which I use.

But if no-one knows that you are away from your desk you can still get asked a question

But conversely no one would know if you’re on the throne either.

Stick “going for a poo” in the (text) chat window.

That’s what the meeting chat window is there for.

“Just popping for a shit comfort break. BRB”

Cougar knows the game.

Take your mobile device with you and ensure you are mic on for full straining sounds?

Wireless headset for the win or use phone for audio anyway. As long as you remember to close the mic when doing the business.

For sure Teams has it’s infuriating features and it will always be less slick than Slack but it has been changing the communication more than most other tools. Teams client has improved over last 6 months quite a bit, memory usage seems reasonable these days – at least compared to modern browsers – and features seem to improve. Just would hope that they would fix UI to make easier to reply to thread vs reply to channel.

Just would hope that they would fix UI to make easier to reply to thread vs reply to channel.

It’s coming, it’s coming…

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/19224826-better-visual-delineation-between-reply-and-sta

Microsoft people also get this wrong quite a bit too.

I have a teams question! I am trying to share a notebook on channel (to a guest) but can’t find how to manage this. Is it a SharePoint issue?

@TheBrick Assuming the guest is a member of the Team, in your channel, click the + icon at the top of the page (add a tab), choose the OneNote option, it’ll head off to find a list of your OneNote notebooks, choose the particular notebook, section or even page from the notebook. This will add the notebook into the channel. Anyone in the Team will be able to see it.

If the guest is not part of the Team then what I typed won’t work. You could maybe share the notebook directly with them by sending them a sharing link from OneNote, you would be collaborating on it, just not within the Team space. HTH.

@beej

It’s coming, it’s coming…

Can’t come soon enough, this really hacks me off. #firstworldproblems etc

Re the Outlook calendar entries;  we have Skype installed although choose not to use it and that’s the default and only option to add a internet call directly into outlook – although you can use the Teams diary to add a Teams call.

How can I change the button/default in Outlook to be Teams not Skype for Business without uninstalling Skype – because my work policy doesn’t allow the latter? This on a MacBook Pro so Office for Mac.

Teams meetings add in

You may have issues if it’s a build controlled by your IT team.

Yeah, it’s [probably | should be] managed via Group Policy. When we switched from S4B to Teams, it all just switched over invisibly from the end user’s perspective. Trying to run the S4B client, it tells me to jog on and use Teams. Your “work policy” is what needs changing.

Though how much of that applies in the Mac world I’ve no idea.

Can I add a team someone to a Team via a non MS email. I have had a students locked out of their college MS accounts. Currently they send me evidence of work by email but I’d like to move that to Teams. Is that possible from say a gmail email account?

I’m sure my question shows huge gaps in my knowledge

PS I can add people to the team if they are already in our instituition

As I understand it, and I could be totally wrong,

What you’re describing there is Federation. A SIP client (Teams / S4B / Lync / OCS / etc etc) in an organisation can talk to another SIP client in a different organisation so long as the respective servers allow Federation. I very much doubt that individual Gmail accounts fall into this category. Might work with G Suite subscribers via Hangouts(?) but I’d be shocked if it worked for personal accounts, there isn’t a global Google SIP server farm to my knowledge.

@ampthill If you just need them to upload their assignment (i.e. you don’t need them to use the chat & meetings features of Teams) then the external user can be granted access to a specific folder via Sharepoint (FYI, Sharepoint is the file storage for your Teams content).

Let’s assume you have a channel (& therefore a Sharepoint folder) already set up for the purpose of holding the uploaded assignments, open this folder in Sharepoint (you should have an “open in Sharepoint” button in Teams), then click to highlight the specific folder in Sharepoint and click the share icon to share the folder, enter the user’s email address, it may default to Read Only, type in a comment if you like and send the invitation to the user. They will probably be asked to prove they are who they say they are by an authentication link being sent to their email.

All this assumes your Admin has turned on external sharing on the Team/Group. There are other settings to control what the user can do, i.e. disable downloads. But this might work if you just want to give them a place to upload files. Once uploaded you can use the “move to” feature to put the file into a different folder.

We also use Guest accounts, basically we allow users with external email addresses to be added to a Team, there’s a policy and agreement they need to sign up to but I’m not too sure how it works in detail I’m afraid.

@Son-of-Mike

Thanks for the detailed reply. I’ll have a play. I suspect if I have a few locked out I’ll just deal with them by email. But it’s useful to know they can’t be a full member

We paid a external company called “cloud box design” to take the data from our database and create teams set up SharePoint etc. Although I can add existing students I suspect they’ll have locked out guests. But I’ll have more confidence asking them now how they set it up

Can I add a team someone to a Team via a non MS email.

Yes, provided your admin has enabled guest access overall. You need to be an owner of the particular team to add a guest.

How to add a guest in Teams