How often does it happen that you join a Microsoft Teams meeting and you get a slightly different user experience from before.
Especially when you join meetings organised by other people you might find that things don’t appear as you would like to.
Types of Microsoft Teams meetings
First of all I will have a look at the different types of meetings in Teams that you could join:
- Meet now
- In 1-1 Chat
- From a Team conversation
- From a document
- Scheduled meeting
- Scheduled meeting in a channel
- Calls
The above isn’t a complete overview as there are simply too many places to look.
Have you ever noticed that when you schedule a meeting and you assign a channel to this meeting then your guests will not have a chat function available. When you however don’t select a channel the chat functionality will be available. When you think about where the message will appear then this might be clear. Your ‘uninvited guests’ (e.g. when you publish a link to a meeting on twitter for people to join) then these attendees will not be able to use chat.
Types of users in Teams meetings
There are multiple types of users in Teams:
- Organizers
- Colleagues
- Invited External users
- Guest users
All these users will have a slightly different experience within Microsoft Teams.
Types of tenants/account
Just some examples of different type of accounts that you may have:
- Office 365 Business tenant
- Office 365 Government tenant
- Education Tenant
- Tenant-less account (shown below, where an account is only connected to multiple tenant as a guest). This happens for example when your Microsoft account given permissions to a team in a tenant.
Tenant Releases
Then there is still another factor that may give you different experiences in Teams. As you may be logging into different tenants as a guests you may find that some features have already been released and other features are yet to be released.
This is when other people in a meeting may tell you that they can see newly released features while you can’t see what they are talking about.
Meeting Policies
As mentioned in Important policies when implementing Microsoft Teams , some behaviours can be adjusted. In this post I’m looking at standard behaviour only.
Finding the different user experiences?
Going through all the options mentioned above would probably result in a post that would never get read. However, it might be important that you can recognise some of the the different options. Here are just a few, focusing on the ellipses menu in the call controls.
When I joined a meeting in a browser I got the following options given to me:
Then when I logged into the Microsoft Teams App I got a different user experience with a different set of options, such as Tun on live captions and Show background effects.
In the above cases I had the options to record a meeting, but now we will see some options where you can’t record the meeting.
When I logged in as a guest without any login I got even more limited options. This was a user who just joint the meeting having found the URL to the meeting somewhere in an email. This could for example be the case when you join a teams meeting for an online conference.
Some of the options below are given to me as I’m part of a certain tenant and for some of these option I get given the option depending on who I am.
Quite often when I click on the link in my invites I just click on the link sometimes I might open the app and sometimes I might open up in a browser. This then sometimes means that I’m logged in with a different account than expected, or I’m joining a meeting while I’m as a guest in a different tenant. All of these things may affect the user experience that I’m seeing Teams.
Have you found any different options that I should mention in this posts? Then please do leave a comment below