Teams Meet Now Feature Gets a Makeover for Group Chats

A “Ringless” Meet Now for Chat Participants

Message Center notification MC762503 (30 March 2024) gives details about a new Meet Now experience for Teams group chats (chats with more than two participants). The Meet Now feature is not a new concept. It’s a feature that has been available for channel conversations and group chats since the earliest days of the Teams product. Basically, Meet Now is a shortcut to start an audio or video online meeting with the participants in a channel or chat conversation without needing to schedule a calendar event.

The change is described in Microsoft 365 roadmap item 128191 and is available for the new Teams (2.1) client (desktop and browser) plus the mobile clients. Rollout to targeted tenants is due in early May 2024 followed soon afterward by general availability worldwide.

Improving How Meet Now Works in Group Chats

Until now, the user interface offered the option of starting a video or audio call (Figure 1).

The new experience replaces the dual video/audio call options with a single Meet Now button (Figure 2). Microsoft says that this starts an: “instant, ringless live discussion with your colleagues, without scheduling a meeting.”

The choice of words used to describe the update is interesting. Microsoft says that Meet Now initiates a: “ringless, live discussion.” A group chat is already a discussion, so the important word is ringless. What happens is that Teams launches an online meeting without “ringing” the participants. Instead, an icon in the menu bar informs group chat participants that a meeting is in progress (Figure 3).

Starting the meeting without ringing means that the group chat participants are not disturbed by a notification to join the meeting. They can join or ignore the meeting as they wish. All the normal meeting capabilities such as recording and transcription are available. Any artifacts generated during the meeting are added to the group chat after the meeting finishes. It’s the kind of change that drives documentation writers (and book authors) up the wall because of the update to the user interface and flow. But no one cares about documentation anymore, do they?

Not an Earthshattering Change

The new Meet Now experience is not an earthshattering change. Rather, it’s an update in the same category as being able to add a custom picture to a group chat – nice but not essential. In this case, the update for the Meet Now feature simplifies the way it works, so it is an improvement without advancing the state of the art.

More Changes Coming

The probability is that we will see other updates of this nature over the next few months. Microsoft’s big effort to introduce the Teams 2.1 client is now tapering down and engineers can devote more energy to rounding out the new client with features that might not have been on the original priority list (or cut to make the target date). That’s not to say that these changes aren’t important. It’s always good to receive updates that refine and improve how software works, and that’s what the new Meet Now implementation does.

So much change (even small ones), all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.