Microsoft Teams: Outlook reminders gain a ‘join meeting’ button | ZDNet

Microsoft has closed a small but important gap in the integration between its Outlook email client and its collaboration app, Teams.

Productivity software like Microsoft Teams has become an organising hub for many businesses after they were forced to introduce more remote working and, in the era of cloud computing, there are regular small tweaks that add to the functionality of these software suites. Most recently, there has been an upgrade to the quality of sound on Teams and the ability to turn off chat during meetings to cut down on disruption.  

Now, according to a posting on the Microsoft Teams UserVoice site, another tweak will add a ‘join meeting’ button in Outlook when a Teams meeting is added to your diary.

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“When I schedule a meeting as a Skype Meeting it adds a “Join Meeting” button to the Outlook reminder that pops up. That button does not exist when I schedule a Teams Meeting. It should,” said one Teams user back in 2017. 

Without that button, the used needed to double click to go into the calendar item, locate the hyperlink to “Join Teams Meeting”, click that, which opened the web browser, and then the web browser tried to launch the Teams app, but first asked for confirmation, which required another click. 

As the user rightly pointed out, Microsoft’s software engineers added a bunch of “unnecessary clicks” that blocked the user’s ability to join a meeting.

“Just include the ‘Join Meeting’ button in the reminders that are generated for a Teams Meeting the same way the button is there in a reminder for a Skype meeting,” the user implored Microsoft three years ago. 

Microsoft has finally caught up with this particular request. A member of the Teams engineer group said Outlook meeting reminders now include the Teams meeting join button in the reminder. 

“When you click the join button, it will bring you to your meeting,” said Microsoft Teams engineer, Alex. 

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Microsoft’s Alex also confirmed that the company is working on a solution to the demand for spellchecking in multiple languages within the Teams apps. 

The feature would be useful for millions of workers who communicate in multiple languages. This request came from a Danish Teams user who works in English and Danish. 

According to Alex, “users who write different messages in different languages, will now see spellchecking relevant to the language they are actively using when typing a message while using the Microsoft Teams Desktop App on Windows.”