Because of the rise of online meetings we are likely having more meetings than ever 😳
but how can we manage all that information going in and out of meetings?
In this video, we take a look at how to run a modern meeting with Microsoft Teams, the best way to take and distribute meeting notes - we go through all the options:
✅ Live transcription
✅ Group Transcribe app (for in-person transcription)
✅ Wiki
✅ OneNote
✅ Planner
✅ SharePoint Pages
So working from home and getting on to Teams has probably meant you're having more meetings than ever, but how can we manage all the information coming in and out of those meetings?
By the end of this video, you'll know how to run a modern meeting with Microsoft Teams, the best way to take and distribute meeting notes. We'll go through all the options. So make sure you stay around until the end of the video to go through all of them.
I've got new videos on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 coming out every Tuesday, so make sure you hit Subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified every time I release a new video.
I'm Gavin Jones, a former transformation manager for a Fortune 500 company, and I help organizations of any size with modern workplace transformations. If you're interested in finding out more and working together, then stick around until the end of the video to find out more.
Part 1: Transcribe
The best way to take meeting notes now is not manually, but by letting the robots do it for us, especially if you need to run a really formal meeting where people are taking old-school minutes and writing down exactly what has been said by every single person you can now get that done for you. I'm going to show you two ways to do that before we move on to then how to distribute, and collate, and get all those notes ready for search and discovery.
So part one is just simply to transcribe the video. If you're having a video meeting, you can then just click transcribe and you'll get all the notes done for you from whatever has been said. So have a look at that. Now, I'll dive into teams.
So here we are inside a meeting, a schedule meeting, because you can't do transcriptions from a channel meeting or from a Meet now at the moment. If you want to know more about all the ways you can do a meeting in Microsoft Teams, because it does get quite confusing, then watch this video after this one to understand all the different ways that you can schedule a meeting and meet over video calling. But assuming you've watched that, you'll have a basic understanding of what scheduled meeting is then we can crack on.
So, if you want to do meeting notes automatically, it's transcription that we want to start. But as we were looking at in parts three, four, and five, when we come to disseminate our meeting, it's probably a good idea to make it more interactive and start the recording, as well, which again, we cover in the previous video. So we'll start recording and we'll start transcription. But in terms of notes, transcription's what we're going to talk about right now, so that's where it's going to record everything you're saying and there's some AI and some robots in the background to go and analyze what we've said and turn it into text. It doesn't always get it right, especially with my garbled voice, but it does do a pretty good job. Enough you'll get the general gist if you were reading it back. Moreso if it's all in text, it's easier for the computer to search it.
So just getting slightly more technical, if you're recording your meeting, what used to happen is that used to get saved in Microsoft Stream, and then Stream would produce some captions for you. As Microsoft is transitioning over from saving your meetings in Stream to saving your meeting recordings in SharePoint and OneDrive, the captions bit isn't done for you whilst you're in that transition. So it's a good idea to turn transcription on for that reason as well, but you can see as we're talking, there's stuff coming up on the right hand side and all of that text is going to be available for us to use in search or for just putting in a Wiki or wherever we want to put it, which we'll have a look at it in the second half of this video.
Part 2: Group Transcribe App
So that's all and good if everyone from your meeting is on Teams and it's an online meeting, it'll know who's talking from which device you're using and ascribe the text to each individual device that is talking. If you've got more than one person in the room, obviously it won't do that. It'll assign it all through the speaker or the laptop that it's going through. Also, if it doesn't work, if you're all in-person in the meeting room. Imagine that these days, that we'd all get together, in-person and have a real life meeting in 3D. Amazing. But that did happen at one point, and I'm sure it'll happen again.
So there's another way that you can still do that without taking notes manually, and that is an app from Microsoft called Group Transcribe. And we'll have a look at that now. So Group Transcribe is a mobile app you can get. It's from Microsoft, so if you type in Microsoft Group Transcribe into your app store, I'm sure it'll pop up, and it's going to talk us through what it does. So it's live transcription and translation for your conversations. So it's basically the same thing that was just done in Teams, but in real life, and it's going to assign who's speaking to each device, but you can have your phone in front of you with Group Transcribe turned on, if it's really important that you take those notes during the meeting, and Group Transcribe will do it for you. So it says you can invite others in the same room, the same physical room, to join with their phones on you. So you share this code and you all sort of join a virtual room, but it knows who's talking from the volume of, your voice is going to be closer to your own device, so it can assign who's talking to each person, and you can then share the transcription.
So we'll set. [inaudible 00:05:10] always worth checking if you've got English, UK. Cool. So now we're in the app. We didn't have to sign in with our Microsoft account. It's just quite a light touch, but we can either enter the code from someone else's room that's already started, we can use our camera to scan the QR code on their device to join the room, or we can start a brand new one. So that's what we're going to do. And see, so it's got this L-K-T-U-A session, which is our room. And if I wanted someone to join it, I could tap on the plus and then they can scan that QR code with their phone, or just type in the code and join the room so that then when they start speaking next to their device, their name will pop up and they'll get the transcription next to what they're saying.
You can see it's very, very similar to what we just did in Teams, but this is a good way you can take notes and really detailed minutes with outdoing any work. So if you are paid to go and write down everything, then just get this app, pretend you're writing everything down, and you will have saved yourself lots of time and hassle. Cool. So, say we've finished that. We'll go back, and then we get our transcription here, which we can then share and stick it into a document or straight into Teams. So we're going to send that to the testing channel in Teams, and that's going to make a post with all of our transcription there. Obviously we could just copy and paste that whole text and put it somewhere better than that, and we'll have a look at that in part three.
So we'll go back into Teams to have a look at where that's, how that's posted before we move on. And you can see it's got all of that transcription that we just talked about right in the post bit of our testing channel, which is where we wanted it to show up. But in part three, like I said, I'll have a look at some better ways of disseminating the information from a meeting.
Part 3: Manual Meeting Notes Options
Okay. So before we have look at how to distribute the meeting notes, let's have a look at some ways that we can manually take notes, which obviously help with distribution anyway, a few different places that we could put notes to show up.
So the first, most obvious one might be, if I just go back in to our existing call, then we've got this section that's called Meeting notes, which sounds exactly like what we want, isn't it? And if we start Meeting notes and this is from a meeting that was scheduled, remember, so that's going to be in the calendar. It's not in a channel, so the assets won't go back into a team. They'll just be saved in the chat like we talked about in the tutorial video. If we click Meeting notes, it says, "Go ahead. Start taking notes." We take notes and it jump us into the Meeting Notes tab of the meeting, which shows up in chat afterwards. And we've got, basically, a Wiki tab in the meeting. So we can have sections. We can't have pages in the Meeting Notes, as far as I'm aware, but then we could write section one of the meeting, which you know is not going to be a great meeting, section one. And here are the notes for section one, and blah, blah, blah. You could you write all the pertinent things you want to do into the Meeting Notes.
So the bad thing about Meeting Notes is that like we started hint in the previous video about meeting calling in Teams being quite disparate and overly complicated, especially if you're new into it, is that all of that information is going to be only stored in this sort of meeting chat piece. So the chances of someone going back to that specific meeting, which will show up in this area first and then thinking, "I know there's some meeting notes. I'll go across to this tab and click Meeting Notes is pretty slim." So anything you take there is sort of by definition, not very permanent. Also, unless anyone pins this chat, it's going to edge down their recent chats, especially if they're using chat quite a lot, and eventually disappear. So the point, I guess, of taking meeting notes is that you can then go back and refer to them, and if you use the Meeting Notes function in Teams in a scheduled meeting or a Meet now, that anything but a channel meeting then basically all of your information will at some point sort of get lost.
So, if you met in a channel, I'm going to go into the testing channel and Meet now in the channel, and then we do Meeting Notes and say Take note, it thinks about it for a bit, and it's going to create a tab called Meeting Notes that is basically the same as a new Wiki tab, but it makes a whole new tab called Meeting Notes, and then we can create notes there. We can have new other pages. It's basically exactly the same functionality as the Wiki tab. And if we flip between the two, you can see they're exactly the same, apart from one's called Meeting Notes. So the first time you click Meeting Notes in the meeting, it's going to create a new tab for you called Meeting Notes. It is then at least therefore, a bit more permanent.
So there's not much benefit of using the Meeting Notes functionality, because it just makes a Meeting Notes tab for you rather than just using the Wiki tab where you might have some other information there as well. So you could then have a page for each meeting and sections of the meeting and put your notes in there.
If you want to know more about Wiki, then check out this video after this one.
But you can add other stuff like pictures to jazz it up. You can add tables. If you wanted to sort of structure your notes better, like you might do in a Word document and have action taker, blah, blah, blah. And obviously you could then not just have exact transcription and notes, but you could have actions as well all in your one little page.
So if you want to then go and grab our transcription from our meeting and then use it, well, if we're on Group Transcription, we can just copy it, copy of the text, and paste it into the app. If we are on here, we could highlight the whole text or we can download it either as a document or as a VTT file. So we'll download it as a document. And it's got all the timings in for us, which we don't need, but we could tidy that up and then paste it in, along with our Wiki, if we wanted to use Wiki to disseminate our meeting notes and then direct people to that Wiki. So if we had in our Wiki in the team, so we could then copy the link to Wiki and then go and post it in Posts, and say, "Here are the meeting outputs." That'll link people then directly to the Wiki tab to that section so they can go and see the notes from that meeting.
If you didn't want to use one note or the Meeting notes functionality in the team, then you could use OneNote. So if we go to add a tab and click on OneNote, that'll add us a shared OneNote for that entire team. We'll use the default team for YouTube notebook, and we can create a new section called meeting notes, let's say. Then you've got a shared OneNote notebook that you can add all of your meeting notes to, multiple people can edit it at the same time during the same meeting, which you can't do in Wiki, because if you're in Wiki, one person will lock out that entire section, and no one else can edit it until they stop. Whereas in OneNote, it's a bit more like Word in that you can have multiple people editing it at the same time. It's a lot more fully functional than Wiki.
So if you want to know all the differences to Wiki and OneNote, then check out this video after this one.
But the downsides of OneNote, is you can't direct people to a specific section of OneNote that then opens in the team. So say we had this meeting today, which is the 21st of May, as I'm recording this video. And we had some texts and blah, blah, blah, loads of really good stuff in here. If you want to start using OneNote tags, you could add some to-dos and things in here for people, some actions, whatever we want, but then to direct people to this particular page, the only real way we can do it is copy link to this page, which sounds similar to what we did in Wiki, but when we get into post it and say, "Here are the outputs." And paste it in, so we get two links, one that jumps us out into the OneNote desktop app, and it opens that notebook for us and the section and the page, but jumps out into the full desktop app, which might be useful because the desktop app is better than using the Teams app, but jumps us out of Teams. And then the web view also jumps us out of Teams into a desktop browser, which is what's opened up here. So neither of them linked to the OneNote tab, unless you got a link just specifically to that tab, but then that wouldn't jump you to the specific page. That's the downside of using OneNote, although it's more fully functioned.
Part 4: Taking Actions
So if you had actions coming out of the meeting, which I think is the main thing that you should be capturing out of your meetings rather than doing full minutes or even notes about what's going on in the meeting, unless you're getting down to actions and decisions taken, then your meeting probably could be run better. Anyway, if you want help doing that and utilizing the technology to make it better, then stick around to the end, because it might be worth having a free strategy call to see how we might be able to help you.
But if you did want to use actions, then probably the most obvious place to go is a planner tab. So if we go and add another planner tab, though are quite a lot of tabs in this channel because we use it for doing lots of videos and other tests, and go and pick planner, which is now bizarrely named Tasks by Planner and To Do, but that's what the sidebar's called, but also the tab. But the tab isn't tasks. It is actually just Planner and not anything to do with To Do, so strange Microsoft have chosen to name the tab that, at least. So if we add Tasks by Planner and To Do, it isn't actually anything to do with To Do. It's just Planner, although you now can see a list, but this is just the Planner and we can add buckets and however we want to structure it.
If you want more tips on how to use Planner for meetings, then check out this video after this one.
But that's how you might then get your actions. And if you wanted to use Wiki or OneNote alongside Planner, then we could have action out of meeting. Again, it'd be an actual action, but you can then copy the link to the task, and go and paste it alongside our actions here. So say maybe this one was called actions, and we can have a link back to that particular action in Wiki, or we could do the same thing in OneNote. So all of your notes, and transcription, and everything is all together. So if you've gone and picked up that transcription from the Word document, we could then paste it under the Wiki and we've got our transcription and the action right there. And the only thing we can't do then in Wiki is then go pin in the exact recording, unless we had a link to it.
Part 5: The Best Way To Distribute Meeting Notes In Microsoft Teams
in Wiki is then go pin in the exact recording, unless we had a link to it.
So probably the best way I think to distribute your meeting notes after the meeting is to use SharePoint News. And if you want to know all about that, then check out this video after that one, where we go through more about SharePoint News for meetings.
But just very quickly, here's a meeting that is using SharePoint News. You can pin it as a tab. You could then have it pop up in the feed automatically, which is what we go through. And we've got very rich stuff, just like a webpage, so we can have a header, we could have the agenda in there that was happening, we can have links to the folders with assets, so the exact deck, we could have the deck put in to the page so we can scroll through it.
And this one's about our modern workplace program, which if you want to know more about, then join a webinar, which is a link in the description below, or book a call with us using the link in the description below, as well.
We can have the video recording, which is pinned up here, which we can't see right now, but that can play back in line, and everything that we've needed to do for the meeting. So if there's a recurring one, we could see what meetings are coming up, and we can have our planner actions pinned right underneath in really rich web page like functionality. Then if we wanted to post that the meeting was there, then one, hopefully, if we've got a really good team structure and strategy and we've got everything in Teams, and we're using the SharePoint site from Teams, we can use the SharePoint News connector to post that into the posts bit of the channel for us, but then also we can get a link to that tab if We wanted to, and then use that to say, "Here are the meeting outputs."
And then we can have a chat about that tab right next to the tabs, so if there's anything that we needed to talk about after the meeting, we've got all of the assets of the meeting there, the recordings, the transcription, blah, blah, blah. Haven't put the transcription in this one, but we could go and get that transcription that we got and copy and paste the text is so then that page becomes a really rich for search. So when we're searching for stuff, then it's going to search all of that transcription, because we've put it right in the page, as well. Little tip, if you want it to get the best of search, but you don't want all of that transcription clogging up your page, just go and stick it in a section right at the bottom, make the text tiny and make it white, and then no one's going to see it, but when you do a search, it's still going to pick up all of that data to go and search by.
So I hope that you've seen from this video that there's a better way of working than simply having back to back meetings with teams video calling. If you want to find out how to make your whole organization more productive and save time, then book on a free strategy call with me.
So check out these videos next, remember to give the video a like, subscribe and if you really like the video, consider supporting the channel by buying me a beer. It really does help support the channel. But thanks for watching so far and we'll see you in the next video.