How to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting from Outlook

December 4, 2020
In this article we’ll instruct you on how to organize Teams meetings through your Outlook profile.
Microsoft’s Teams application, released for the first time in 2017, is a very useful tool for organizing meetings with anyone you want. Real time online communication with your colleagues, classmates, teachers, or even friends and relatives has never been this easy to achieve thanks to Teams. Here’s a step by step guide on How To Use Microsoft Teams .
How does this software work? You’ll need to access Teams with your Microsoft account, and once you’re in you can participate in a “team”, meaning a group that consists of members that access said team by using a password or by clicking on a link. Here, you’ll take part in scheduled meetings held by a member of the team, and these meetings consist in group video calls.
Teams meetings are programmed through the app itself, but there’s a way to do so from your Microsoft Outlook profile, too. Find out how in the following paragraphs!
Set up Teams meetings with Outlook
Microsoft Office’s services tend to use software utilities, or add-ins, that are added to a primary application to expand its capabilities. Outlook is an add-in included in Teams, meaning that these two apps are connected, and that’s how we can schedule Teams meetings directly from Outlook. Plus, you can view, accept or join meetings from both applications.
ATTENTION: it is currently not possible to choose the channel in which the scheduled meeting will take place.
Let’s see how we can plan Teams meetings from Outlook on Desktop/Web, Android and iOS.
Desktop and Web
Open Outlook and switch to the calendar view. Click New Teams Meeting at the top of the view:
- add the participants to the Required or Optional field(s). Know that you can even invite entire contact groups (formerly known as distribution lists)
- establish your meeting subject, location, start time, and end time
- create an invitation message
- lastly, click Send.
ATTENTION: the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs are added to the meeting invite automatically.
If the New Teams Meeting icon doesn’t show up in Outlook, the Teams add-in for Outlook might not be installed properly.
- To automatically solve the problem, you can download the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant, that will run tests to identify and find a solution to the issue.
- If you want to take matters in your own hands and manually solve the problem, visit Use the Teams Meeting add-in in Outlook.
Android and iOS
The course of action for organizing Teams meetings from Outlook for Android and iOS is exactly the same:
-
once you’re in Outlook, tap on the calendar icon in the bottom right of the app, then tap the “+” icon
- scroll down to Teams Meeting and turn the toggle switch on
- fill out your meeting details, and then tap the check mark in the top right of the app.
As we saw earlier for desktop, add the invitees to the Required or Optional field(s). You can invite entire contact groups (formerly known as distribution lists) as well. Enter your meeting subject, location, start time, and end time, and then create your message. Tap Send and you’re done.