How the Teams Meeting Recap Highlights Important Meeting Resources

Recording, Transcript, and Attendance Report at Organizer Fingertips

A Teams meeting is an online space where people can come together with audio and video feeds. Each space or thread has a unique identifier to allow people to connect to the right meeting, and each space has its own set of resources. Chat is the most basic resource and is available for all meetings; other resources include a transcript, shared files, attendance roster, notes, whiteboard, and recordings (a single meeting can have several recordings for different parts of the meeting).

Meeting Recap

Microsoft is overhauling the way tenant users access resources for meetings through the calendar app with what they refer to as a “meeting recap” (Office 365 notification MC233470, 9 January, roadmap item 68729). On February 23, Microsoft adjusted roll-out dates from the end of January to early March to be completed worldwide by early April.

Meeting recap is only available for private meetings. These are meetings which are not published in a channel or organized on an impromptu basis using the Meet Now feature. In a nutshell, the details tab for a meeting viewed through the calendar app highlights three important resources to make it easier for meeting participants to access. The resources are:

• Meeting Recording (if available).
• Transcript (if available).
• Attendance report (only meeting organizers can access the attendance report).

Figure 1 shows details of a private meeting where the recording, transcript, and attendance report are available.

Because the meeting recap is a new interface for existing data, it also applies to old meetings. For Meet Now or channel meetings, the resources are accessible through the meeting chat.

Meeting Attendance Update

Microsoft published MC221432 on 3 September to say that a new version of the attendance report is coming (roadmap item 66459). The notification was updated on 12 November with a new deployment date set for early February.

The old attendance report contains basic information and is only available during a call. The new attendance report contains more detail about participants joining and leaving online meetings and can be downloaded as a CSV file after the meeting is over (it takes a little time for the report to be generated). Only organizers can access the attendance report

Live Transcription and Recording

Announced in MC220987 on 26 August and later updated 10 November, Teams will offer meeting organizers and presenters the options to create a transcript of a meeting or a recording with an automatic transcript. This is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 65967 and roll-out is due in mid-February. It’s another example of Microsoft using its Azure Cognitive Services capabilities to generate text from speech (as available in Word).

Unlike today, recording a meeting will also generate a transcript captured from conversation during the meeting (Figure 2). Linking a recording and transcript is likely being done to replicate what’s available when Stream generates an automatic transcript for Teams meeting recordings kept in its Azure-based store. This feature doesn’t work when Teams stores recordings to OneDrive for Business, so managing the transcript in Teams is a direct replacement for functionality which used to be delivered by Stream.

Transcription is currently only available when a meeting is held in English. Stream supports transcripts formed from automatic captions generated for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, so there’s some work to do for Teams to catch up.

Meeting participants can view the live transcript during and after the meeting and download it when the meeting completes in either Word (DOCX) or Web Video Text Track (VTT) format. If necessary, the meeting organizer can delete the transcript. Unlike Stream, you can’t currently edit the online transcript to correct obvious mistakes. You can correct errors in the Word or VTT file and share that version.

Recordings for Teams meetings recently received an update to support the 3×3 gallery view instead of the previous 2×2 view. The new view is available for recordings of meetings with more than five people with video feeds whether the recording is stored in OneDrive for Business or Stream.

The ability for organizers and presenters to generate a transcript or create a meeting recording is controlled by the Allow transcription and Allow cloud recording settings in the meeting policy assigned to their accounts (Figure 3). Both need to be on to enable the full range of resources available for a meeting.

Transcription shouldn’t be confused with live captions, which is a per-user feature intended to allow participants who need some assistance to follow discussions in online meetings to know who’s talking and what they are saying.

Guest Access

Guest users don’t have access to the calendar app, so they can’t use the meeting recap. Guests can participate in meeting chat, but they’ll need permission to access files shared in the meeting.

Guests can be assigned permissions to view meeting recordings, but only if the files are stored in OneDrive for Business rather than Stream. As advised in MC230505 (17 December), Microsoft is changing the access to recordings in February to allow users with view-only permissions to view recordings stored in OneDrive without being able to download the files.

If needed, an organizer can download the attendance report and transcript and make them available to guest users through OneDrive for Business.

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User interface details like this help people exploit application capabilities more fully. In-depth coverage of technology like that in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook helps tenant administrators understand and exploit Office 365 more fully. Need we say more?