Microsoft Teams is one of the leading Workstream Collaboration apps available to the multitude. WSC apps went from being an option to a necessity in the past couple of months. Organizations worldwide have clung to apps like Microsoft Teams to keep their businesses floating as Rose did to that door (RIP Jack).

Whether you want to have video meetings, or share and collaborate on files with your team members, the organizational structure of Microsoft Teams makes it increasingly easy to do so. Using Microsoft Teams, you can not only have video meetings with your organization members but outsiders as well, whether or not they have a Microsoft Teams account.

Invite People During a Meeting

Whether it is an ad-hoc meeting that can happen only in a teams channel, or a scheduled meeting taking place in a channel, any team members who have access to the channel can join the meeting from there. But it is not the only way for people to join your meeting. You can invite anyone – organization members as well as guests – to a meeting in Microsoft Teams at any time during the call.

Click on the ‘Show Participants’ icon on the call toolbar in the meeting. The participant list will open on the right side of the screen.

Now, if you want to invite someone who belongs to the same organization as you – team members and non-team members alike – click on the ‘Invite someone’ text box and start typing their name.

Suggestions for organization members will appear underneath the text box. Select the person you want to invite.

As soon as you click on their name, Microsoft Teams will start calling them. They can accept the call to join the meeting.

To invite someone from outside your organization, click on the ‘Copy Join info’ button next to the invite text box.

The meeting info will be copied to your clipboard. When you paste the joining info, it will be in the form of a ‘Join Microsoft Teams Meeting’ link. Send it through an email, message, or any other means to the people you want to invite.

They can then join the meeting from the link in the message as Guests. It doesn’t matter whether or not the person has a Microsoft Teams account. Anyone can join the meeting from the invite link.

Note: Guests have to be admitted to the meeting by someone already in the meeting after they have joined.

Invite People Before a Meeting

Microsoft Teams Office 365 Business subscribers also have an additional functionality than the Microsoft Teams Free users. In addition to hosting ad-hoc meetings, they can also schedule meetings well in advance. And scheduling the meetings is not only for your benefit. You can also invite people while scheduling the meeting so they can have a heads up and manage their schedules to accommodate the meeting.

In the scheduler screen, click on the ‘Add required attendees’ to invite people. For organization members, start entering their names and click on the name of the person when it appears below the text box.

For people outside your organization, enter their email IDs into the text box.

An invite email will be sent automatically to everyone with the meeting link and the date and time of the meeting after you click on the ‘Send’ button on the meeting scheduler.

The recipients will then be able to join at the time of the meeting from their invite link.

It is quite easy to invite anyone to a Microsoft Teams meeting, whether or not they are in the same organization as you. Additionally, you can invite people not just during a meeting, but also in advance for scheduled meetings.