How Do Teams and Outlook Work Together?

My email and Microsoft Teams are the tools I often find myself using. However, it seems that I only use both simultaneously when scheduling meetings. Teams and Outlook integrate in so many other ways that can help make life easier when using two tools. Let’s explore how they work together and why it is helpful.

Send an email to Teams – Share to Teams

The share to teams button in Outlook sends the email you’ve selected straight into Microsoft Teams.

When you click share to teams, a pop-up will appear where you can choose to share the email to a person, meeting or group chat, or channel.

If you choose to share it in a Channel, it appears as a new post with the date, name of sender and content of the email.

So why is this useful? Well, it’s a great way to ensure your Team have all the information. Someone may send an email and forget to copy the Team on, so you can forward it in. It also helps if you are working on a project, and the customer emails you something important to the project – forward it to the Team so everyone can see the update and there is no gap in knowledge sharing.

You can also share an email to Teams by copying the Channel email address. Do this by clicking on the three dots next to a channel, then email address. From there, you can copy it and forward your email to it.

Reply to Teams messages directly from your email

You may be familiar with the emails from Microsoft Teams telling you that “your teammates are trying to reach you”, but what many people don’t know is that you can reply to the message directly from that email. Open the email, scroll down and click reply. You can then type a message and send it without going to the conversations in Teams.

You can do this with both chat messages and channel messages. In the example above, this was a Teams meeting chat.

Why is this useful? Well, primarily time-saving – you don’t need to go to Teams, try and find the conversation or Team and then reply, do it without leaving Outlook.

Meet now from Outlook

We are all probably familiar with scheduling Teams meetings via Outlook, but we can also start an ad hoc meeting from Outlook. Click on meet now to open an ad hoc meeting and add your participants to it in your Outlook calendar.

A new Teams meeting will pop up, and you can rename it before joining. Once in the meeting, add your participants and begin your discussion.

Ever said to your colleague “let’s jump on a call” and then proceed to schedule a Teams meeting? For now, the other person has to wait for it to come through their email, then you both join? Meet now solves that problem – create an ad hoc meeting and invite them to join. It’s much quicker.

Change meeting options from Outlook meeting invite

You can change your meeting options in the Teams calendar and the Teams meeting, but you can also do this from the Outlook invite. Check out my previous blog to learn more about meeting settings: How to Change Meeting Settings in Teams.

Open your meeting invite in Outlook (you have to be the meeting organiser to do this) and click on meeting options at the top.

The meeting options in Outlook does the same thing as the meeting options in the Teams calendar; it opens a pop up with options to change your meeting settings, including who can present, if there is a lobby and customising the chat and mic options for attendees.