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About this lesson

Office integration with Teams includes several features built into Outlook. Teams and Outlook work together to help improve team collaboration and improve productivity. In this lesson, we'll look at Teams integration with both Outlook and Outlook online including scheduling team meetings, emailing to a channel, and sending a Teams post to any email address.

Quick reference

Working with Teams in Outlook

Teams and Outlook are tightly integrated.

When to use

Use Outlook to schedule team meetings, attach documents to email, share a Teams post to Outlook as well as send mail to a team channel.

Instructions

When you add a Microsoft or Office 365 email account to Outlook, Outlook Teams functionality is automatically added. As a result, you do not need to do anything to enable Teams functionality in Outlook.

The Teams calendar and the Outlook calendar are actually two different views of the same calendar. As a result, the Teams and Outlook calendar are always identical. 

You can click the ellipses of any post in Teams and select Send to Outlook. This makes it simple to share content with people outside of your organization or on other teams.

To create a Teams meeting in the desktop version of Outlook, select the Calendar and click New Teams Meeting. To create a Teams meeting in the web version of Outlook, click on the Calendar, select New Event, and set the switch that says Teams meeting. When the meeting request is created, the URL for the meeting is added to the body of the message. 

If you have an email message that would be great to put into a channel, you can email a message to a channel. Click on the ellipses (...) by the channel name to find the email address. 

Finally, you can send attachments to files in Teams two ways. In Teams, you can select the file, click on the ellipses, and select Copy link, then paste the link into the body of an email. If you have recently worked on the file, you can attach the file directly in Outlook by starting an email, then selecting Attach, and selecting the file with from the list. Files in Teams will have a URL as being hosted in SharePoint which you can see by hovering over any file with cloud icon in the list. You may recall from earlier lessons that SharePoint is where Teams files are located. The files will have a cloud icon next to them indicating they are stored in the cloud, rather than your PC.

When you select the file, you will have the option of attaching a copy of the file to the email or inserting a URL to the file. Adding a copy of the file sends a stand-alone copy of the file to each person on the To: line of the email. Sending a link to ensure that each person views the same copy of the file. In this way, if the document is updated before the email is received, the recipient sees and comments on the latest version of the document. 

Hints & tips

  • As a best practice, insert a link to an attachment hosted in Teams rather than a copy of the document. 
  • Remember that you can email a detailed message to a channel in Teams.
  • Sharing a link to a file in Teams in email does not automatically grant the person permission to view the file. 
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  • 00:04 Many people spend a lot of time in Outlook, so
  • 00:06 let's take a look at how Outlook and Teams can work together.
  • 00:09 First up, you'll see the calendar view and
  • 00:11 Teams, side by side with the Outlook calendar year.
  • 00:15 And as you can see, the Outlook calendar and the Teams' calendar are synchronized.
  • 00:19 Consequently, you can feel free to create a meeting in Teams or
  • 00:23 a meeting in Outlook, and it will always show up in the other calendar.
  • 00:27 Another way that Teams is integrated with Outlook is in the posts view for
  • 00:31 a team channel.
  • 00:34 You can click on the ellipsis next to any particular thread and
  • 00:38 say Share To Outlook.
  • 00:41 This allows you to set a team post to whoever you like.
  • 00:44 In this case, let's send it to Ervin.
  • 00:47 And we'll click Send.
  • 00:49 This way you can easily send the details of a post to someone else.
  • 00:53 Back in Outlook, one of the major features in Outlook is the ability to create a team
  • 00:58 meeting directly in Outlook.
  • 00:59 Let's see what that looks like.
  • 01:01 We're going to click Calendar.
  • 01:03 And then at the top, there is a Team Meetings icon in the menu.
  • 01:08 This capability is installed automatically in Outlook
  • 01:11 whenever you connect outlook up to Office 365.
  • 01:14 You do not have to specifically install a Teams add-in.
  • 01:17 So we'll click on New Teams Meeting, which adds the team-meeting URL.
  • 01:22 And this way the people who receive the meeting invitation
  • 01:25 will be reminded by Outlook before the team meeting begins.
  • 01:28 They can just click on the pop-up reminder and drop into the meeting.
  • 01:31 And of course,
  • 01:32 if the meeting does include dialing phone numbers, those will be added as well.
  • 01:37 You can also create a team meeting in Outlook WebEx
  • 01:40 should you not have access to the Outlook client.
  • 01:43 Click on the calendar.
  • 01:44 Click on New Event.
  • 01:47 And then whenever you fill out your form,
  • 01:49 turn on the switch that says Teams Meeting.
  • 01:52 While you can't see it before it's sent, it will add the URL to the invitation.
  • 01:57 We'll just fill this out and then send the meeting request
  • 02:03 When you click on the meeting in the calendar,
  • 02:05 you'll see join the team meetings directly in the details.
  • 02:09 Finally, there's one more way that you can connect with Outlook in Teams.
  • 02:12 If you click on any particular channel,
  • 02:15 you'll see that each channel has an email address.
  • 02:19 In this way, you can send an email from your inbox to a team thread.
  • 02:25 So we'll forward this email to our channel.
  • 02:28 Click Send, and we'll return back to the channel.
  • 02:34 And now you can see the forwarded email in the channel.
  • 02:36 This is a great way to share important information with your team.
  • 02:40 New features are being added all the time with Outlook and Teams integration.
  • 02:44 So don't be surprised when you open up Outlook and
  • 02:46 discover new ways to interact with Teams.

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