Teams Meet Now Feature Available in Mobile Clients

Impromptu Meetings from Mobile Devices

Long available in the Teams desktop and browser clients, the Meet Now feature is now available in Teams mobile clients. Meet Now can create a private meeting (in a user calendar) or a channel meeting. Channel meetings are available to anyone in the team owning the channel while only those invited can attend a private meeting.

Controlling Meet Now

Sometimes referred to as instant, unplanned, impromptu, or ad-hoc meetings, the ability to use the Meet Now feature is controlled by the Teams meeting policy assigned to user accounts. Two settings are available:

• Allow Meet Now in channels: Controls if the user can use Meet Now to create a new channel meeting. Applies to all channels in all teams the user belongs to.
• Allow Meet Now in private meetings: Controls if the user can use Meet Now to create private meetings.

When using PowerShell to manage settings, run the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet and set AllowMeetNow and AllowPrivateMeetNow to True or False. True (allowed) is the default in both cases.

In most situations, Meet Now is a convenient and useful way to start an on-demand meeting without going through a scheduling process using the Teams calendar app or the Teams meeting add-in for Outlook (also available for mobile devices). Some organizations, mostly in the education space, don’t allow Meet Now meetings and use meeting policies to stop users creating them.

Using Meet Now in Teams for iOS

When enabled, the Meet Now icon appears in the top right-hand corner of the calendar and channel conversation screens. Figure 1 shows how it appears when reading channel conversations.

When Meet Now is chosen, Teams creates a new online space for the channel meeting and posts a message in the channel to inform team members about the meeting. Although any team member can join a channel meeting, it’s usually the case that the organizer only needs to speak to a select few, so they can invite people to join after creating the call (Figure 2). This action notifies the invitees that the meeting is in progress. People outside the team can be invited too. While these attendees can join the online meeting, they won’t be able to access other meeting resources because these belong to the team.

Users also have the option to copy the deeplink used to connect to the online meeting space and send it to people using any of the sharing capabilities available on the mobile device. Figure 3 shows an email generated containing the deeplink. This could equally be done via WhatsApp, Facebook, Messages or any other app on the device which supports sharing.

Increasing Mobile Use

Although desktop clients might always continue to be the most powerful in terms of available features, there’s no doubt that mobile clients are used for a growing percentage of access to applications like Teams. For that reason, it’s essential that application developers make sure that the most important features are available in mobile clients, which is just what Microsoft has done with Meet Now.

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