How to Use Meet Now in the Teams Calendar App

Create On-Demand Private Meetings Without Scheduling

Office 365 Notification MC189276 (30 August 2019) tells us that the new Teams Calendar App will get the ability to host private on-demand video or audio meetings from the desktop or browser client. The feature is also documented in Office 365 roadmap item 54208, which promises meetings with “no calendar, no scheduling, no fuss.”

The Meet Now feature is rolling out worldwide in mid-September with GCC tenants getting it in mid-October. Microsoft says that every Office 365 tenant will have the feature by the end of November.

How Meet Now Works

To create a new on-demand meeting, click the Meet now button in the Calendar app (Figure 1).

Teams then starts a meeting. You can choose what settings you want to use , join it as the organizer and then add whoever else you want to meet with (Figure 2), including both tenant and guest users.

The meeting is private because no trace exists of it in the user’s calendar or a Teams channel.

Teams Meeting Policy Setting for Allow Meet Now

All users are allowed to run on-demand meeting unless they’re barred by the Teams meeting policy assigned to their account. To stop users, open the meeting policy in the Teams Admin Center and set the “Allow Meet now in Private meetings” slider from On to Off (Figure 3).

Updating Allow Meet Now with PowerShell

You can also do this in PowerShell by updating the AllowPrivateMeetNow setting from True to False. First, let’s find out what meeting policies allow the Meet Now feature:

# Find out what Teams meeting policies allow Meet Now
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy | Format-Table Identity, AllowPrivateMeetNow

Identity                           AllowPrivateMeetNow
--------                           -------------------
Global                                            True
Tag:AllOn                                         True
Tag:RestrictedAnonymousAccess                     True
Tag:AllOff                                        False
Tag:RestrictedFunctionality                       True
Tag:Default                                       True
Tag:Kiosk                                         True

Let’s say that we don’t want users assigned the RestrictedFunctionality policy to use Meet Now. To update the policy, run the Set-CSTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet to update the setting to False.

# Update Teams meeting policy to block user access to Meet Now feature in Calendar app
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "RestrictedFunctionality" -AllowPrivateMeetNow $False

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Need to know more about Teams? Read the several chapters covering all aspects of this topic in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.