Teams handles your meetings, calls and internal chat. Most of it is straightforward once you know where things live. This covers setting up a meeting, inviting people outside your business, finding a recording afterwards, and what to do when a call sounds like a robot.

Setting up a meeting

1. In Outlook, open your Calendar and click New Teams Meeting on the Home tab. If you do not see that button, create a normal meeting and look for a Teams Meeting toggle on the invitation.
2. Add the people you want, set the time, and send it. The joining link goes into the invitation automatically.
3. To invite someone outside your business, just add their email address like anyone else. They can join from a browser without installing Teams and without a Microsoft account. Tell them that, because plenty of people assume they need an account and give up.
4. To join, click Join in the calendar item or in the meeting reminder. Check your camera and microphone on the screen that appears before you go in.

Recording a meeting

1. In the meeting, click More (the three dots at the top), then Record and transcribe, then Start recording.
2. Everyone in the meeting is told it is being recorded. Say so out loud as well, as a courtesy and because recording people without telling them causes problems you do not want.
3. Stop the recording, or just end the meeting, and it processes in the background for a few minutes.
4. To find it afterwards, look in the meeting chat, where a link appears. Recordings of your own meetings are saved in your OneDrive, in a folder called Recordings. Recordings of channel meetings are saved in that team's SharePoint site instead.
5. Share it the same way as any other file. Right-click, then Share, then copy the link. Do not download it and email it around.

Recordings do not last forever. Many businesses have them set to delete automatically after a set period. If a recording matters, save a copy somewhere sensible and do not rely on the automatic one still being there in six months.

Fixing call quality

Choppy audio, frozen video and people cutting out are nearly always the network or the headset rather than Teams itself.

1. Use a wired network cable if you can. This is far and away the biggest improvement available. A laptop on a dock with a cable will hold up when wifi will not.
2. If you are on wifi, move closer to the access point. Kitchens, back rooms and anywhere behind a brick wall are the usual dead spots.
3. Turn your camera off. Video uses several times more capacity than audio. If the call is breaking up, dropping video usually fixes the sound immediately.
4. Use a proper headset, not the laptop's built-in microphone. A laptop microphone picks up the room, the fan and the keyboard, and echo in a meeting is nearly always someone using speakers rather than a headset.
5. Check what else is running. A large file syncing, a backup, or someone streaming in the next room will all eat the same connection.
6. Close Teams completely and reopen it, then restart the computer if that does not help.
7. Check the right device is selected. In a call, click More, then Settings, then Device settings, and confirm the speaker and microphone are your headset and not something else.

If that didn't fix it

If it is bad for everyone in the office rather than one person, or bad every day at the same time, that is worth investigating properly. Log a ticket and tell us who is affected, whether they are on wifi or cable, whether it is audio or video or both, and roughly when it happens. Teams keeps quality data for each call, so we can look back at a specific meeting and see where the trouble was, but we need the date and time to find it.

If your internet connection is simply not up to the number of people using it, we will tell you that plainly rather than adjusting settings that will not help.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.