As we have spoken on many times before, it is very easy to manage your meeting attendees in Microsoft Teams, but let's see what else we can do once the call has started and the features that we may expect our attendees to use.

Show Conversation

This is where you can have a side conversation, in text, during the meeting. The meeting chat is where people can either post their discussions, ideas, post gifs, or attach files directly from their computer.

It is a great way to manage the questions that people may have if you have a large group. Just like when you are talking in Teams, simply click in the bottom field, add your message and hit enter. Below the message bar is where you can see all the additional things you can do.

The bar allows you to format your text, as though it was a Word document (size, bold, italic, font colour, adding a table, create a bullet list, quote, insert a link, and mark as important). The other options add small side things such as gifs, stickers, and emojis.

Raise Your Hand

The Raise Your Hand function can make it easier to communicate your questions. At any time, simply click on the Raise Your Hand button, and it will notify the presenter that you have your hand up.

This will let them know that you would like to add to the discussion.

Once you have clicked on it, it will let the organizer know with a notification on the Participants list and show who has raised their hand.

More Actions

The More Actions menu is where you can really do some fun things! Let's break down the list from top to bottom.

Device Settings: Here is where you can adjust the settings for your speaker, your microphone, and your camera. You can change through the different options of what you have plugged in. You can also test to see if your microphone is picking up any background noise, or even your voice in general.

Meeting options: You can set up these options prior to starting your meeting, but in case you need to change them on the fly, they can be found here.

Meeting notes: This will allow you to take notes for the meeting, and have them shared in real time with all the attendees. A few quick things to keep in mind:

• Only people in the same organization as the organizer are able to start or access meeting notes.
• Meeting notes are available in meetings with up to 100 people.
• Only people who are invited to a meeting before notes are created will have access to them. Others can request access, and the owner of the notes will be notified via email.

Now that you have taken all the notes you may need in the meeting and the meeting is complete, simply go back into the meeting chat and you will see a box for meeting notes. If you need access to them, simply click on show notes in full screen.

Meeting details:  This is where you can see all the meeting information. If you need to create an invite link, you can simply click Copy join info and it will automatically create a join link for you to send out.

Gallery, Large Gallery, and Together Modes: These are simple ways that can show the people on cameras.

• Gallery is the normal view.
• Large Gallery is for when you have a larger amount of people in the meeting.
• Together Mode is a neat way to make it look like you are all in a classroom (with more options coming soon!). You will see below a small part of the Blueshift team in Together Mode.

Apply background effects: This will allow you to apply background effects, or even blur what is behind you, in case you are working from a coffee shop, or have a lot of distractions going on behind you. We have spoken about it in the past, so if you are curious, check out how to create a custom background in Microsoft Teams.

Turn on live captions: This is an amazing option for enabling greater accessibility in your meetings by giving you live captions of the conversation. This will allow everyone to attend the meeting, including people with hearing issues, people without any sort of speaker, and even large groups that do not have access to sound in a large room.

Start Recording: This is where you can record your meetings. It is as easy as clicking Start Recording, and it will inform everyone in the meeting that it is recording. The Recordings will be stored in one of 2 places.

• For channel meetings, it will be stored in the recordings folder of your file tab.
• For any other kind of meetings, it will be stored in the OneDrive recordings folder of the person who started the meeting.

Note: The recordings being stored in SharePoint or OneDrive is rolling out, and may not be available to all tenants yet.

Share Content

The final thing we will talk about is the share content buttons.

To share your screen or content, simply click the Share Content button. When sharing a screen, it will give you a few options:

• Desktop: This will allow you to select a screen, and share everything on that screen.
• Window: This will allow you to select a specific open window to show. For example, if you are showing someone how to use SharePoint, you would select the window that has the SharePoint within it. Important note, if you navigate away from the window you're sharing, your attendees will not switch to the new window you are looking at until you change what you are sharing.
• PowerPoint/browse: This is where you can upload and share any documents from your PC, or your OneDrive.
  
  Note that this will give all attendees access to the file. If you are doing a PowerPoint presentation and do not want participants to move forward through the slides on their own, simply click the eye icon in the navigation bar at the top of your meeting.

If you have any other questions about Teams or Microsoft 365, reach out to us at Blueshift Innovations, and we will happily talk about how we can make your experience better.