Teams Meet App to Manage Meetings

Deployment Delayed, and Meet App Only Works on Teams 2.1 Client

In a 28 July update to message center notification MC660610. Microsoft moved the rollout schedule for the Teams Meet app from mid-August to mid-October. The Meet app is only available for the new Teams 2.1 client (desktop and browser), which is why it won’t be available early for targeted release tenants. Instead, everyone will see the Meet app when Microsoft releases it for general availability, which is the same timeframe to release the Teams 2.1 client to the General Channel for Office.

From now on, you can expect Microsoft to release features targeted on the Teams 2.1 client and not for the classic client. For example, the new Microsoft 365 multi-tenant organization feature enables a bunch of “seamless collaboration” features in Teams, but those features only surface in Teams 2.1.

The Teams Meet app is preinstalled, meaning that users can find the app in the overflow […] menu in the left app navigation bar. Organizations can use a setup policy to pin the app to the navigation bar or leave this for users to do. If you don’t want people to use the Meet app, you can disable it in the Apps section of the Teams admin center.

Teams Meet App

According to Microsoft, the Meet app is “a centralized hub for all meeting activity and content.” In a nutshell, it’s a place to go to learn about upcoming meetings and retrieve information (chat, agenda, recaps) for meetings from the past (Figure 1).

Essentially, the Meet app gives another view onto calendar information, much like the Teams channel calendar app extracts and displays meeting data for a specific channel from the calendar events stored in the owning team’s group mailbox. The idea is that instead of browsing the calendar to review meetings, the Meet app makes the task easier by highlighting recent and upcoming meetings. Quite how this will play out for people whose habit is to use the calendar in their own particular way remains to be seen.

As you can see from Figure 1, the Meet app divides meetings into two sections: Up next and Recent. It’s important to realize that the app is not a silver bullet to remove any limitations that exist with meetings. For example, meeting artifacts like Loop-based collaborative meeting notes are only available to tenant members. Because of the sharing restrictions imposed by Loop, guest attendees can’t access these notes.

The listing of upcoming meetings is a good way to check out the next ten or so meetings scheduled in your calendar. If necessary, you can quickly change your RSVP response to a meeting, check attendee status, and so on. It’s certainly different to scanning events placed on a traditional calendar grid, and this might take some a little time to become used to.

The Recent section lists previous meetings over the last 30 days. Essentially, this is fast access to recent meetings to allow users to find items related to those meetings like the chat, attached files, and transcripts. If you have Teams Premium licenses, you can use the view recap button to view the intelligent meeting recap (you can get some Teams Premium trial licenses to test this feature out).

A Different Way to Work

Many of my Teams meetings are hosted in other tenants. Much of the potential usefulness of the Recent section in the Meet app disappears in this context. The notes, chat, and other artifacts for meetings I attend as a guest are stored in those tenants and inaccessible through the Meet app. I can use the app to get a quick overview of what’s due to happen today, but it’s no more useful than glancing at my calendar in Outlook or Teams. For this reason, the app quickly lost its attraction for me.

But I can see how people who spend a lot of time attending internal meetings in their home tenant can get value from the Meet app. This cohort is probably the target market for the Meet app. In fact, it seems like an app designed for large enterprises where many employees fall into the target group. Just like Microsoft, in fact.