Using Collaborative Notes in Teams Meetings

The Joy of Collaborative Meeting Notes

Announced in preview in a Microsoft Technical Community post on June 14 with a follow up post on June 15, Teams users configured for the preview version can create collaborative notes in meetings. Only the meeting organizer must use Teams preview; other meeting participants don’t need to use the preview.

At this time, collaborative meeting notes are only available for personal meetings. Ad-hoc and channel meetings are unsupported as are 1:1 calls.

Collaboration via Loop Components

Collaborative notes are no more than a Loop component composed of three separate Loop components – an agenda, bulleted list, and task list like those available for use in Teams chat. The Teams desktop and browser clients support collaborative meeting notes, but Teams mobile doesn’t yet,

Like Loop components used in chat, you’ll find the components used for collaborative meeting notes in the meeting organizer’s OneDrive for Business account rather than Syntex Repository Services, as used by the Loop app. To make the component available, Teams shares the file with all meeting participants. Like other Loop components, guest accounts and other external participants can’t access collaborative meeting notes. They can participate in the meeting, but someone will have to share meeting notes in a different format afterward. For instance, by copying content from the component and pasting it into Word.

Basic Flow of Collaboration

The basic idea is that when you create a Teams meeting, you select the “add an agenda others can offer” under the regular message body (Figure 1).

This action causes Teams to create the Loop component and insert it into the meeting. You can edit the content to set things up for the meeting. For instance, use the agenda component to list the topics for discussion. During the meeting, the component is editable by any meeting participant (except guests) through the Notes tab (Figure 2), and it’s a great way to keep track of commitments made and assigned tasks.

One thing I don’t like is that I can’t have the Chat and Notes tabs visible at the same time. It would be nice to be able to copy text created in chat and use it within meeting notes.

After the meeting, any participant can edit the meeting notes to add new items or clarify content (Figure 3).

The task list component supports the ability to open its tasks in Planner (Figure 4). This might be an easier way to manage a complex set of tasks, but be aware that some of the information entered for tasks in Planner doesn’t synchronize back to the task list.

You can also access assigned tasks through the Tasks by Planner and To Do app (Figure 5). When you receive a task in a meeting task list, To Do picks up it and includes the task in the list it surfaces in the app. However, even if you’re the meeting organizer, you can’t see the tasks assigned to other meeting participants. The Tasks by Planner and To Do app doesn’t have the ability to read the full task list for a meeting.

Another way to tidy up collaborative meeting notes is to open the Loop component in the Microsoft 365 app in a browser (Figure 6). To do this, click on the Loop component title in the meeting details or use the copy component option to create a link to the component that you can paste into the browser.

Good Feature for Internal Meetings

Overall, collaborative meeting notes is a good implementation of how nested Loop components combine together to deliver a useful tool. Being based on Loop components, meeting notes inherit the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. Being able to take the component and use it elsewhere (like the Loop app or pasted into Outlook for wider distribution) is very nice. Not being able to collaborate with external users isn’t so thrilling. The bottom line is that this feature should be popular for internal meetings but if you work in an organization that places heavy emphasis on external collaboration, it won’t be valuable until Microsoft enables external sharing for Loop components.

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