Microsoft Teams helps keep sensitive information secure. When scheduling Teams meetings, consider if the meeting could involve confidential information and may invite meeting guests. Those factors will guide you to schedule the meeting either as a Teams channel meeting (most secure) or an Outlook calendar meeting.

Outlook Meeting or Teams Channel Meeting?

In general, create Teams channel meetings when sharing confidential information. Review the scenarios below to help choose between scheduling a Teams channel meeting or an Outlook meeting.

Meeting Scenario	Microsoft Outlook Meeting	Teams Channel Meeting
Your meeting chat is not sensitive (including historical chat).	✔	✔
Your meeting chat is sensitive, and guests are sometimes invited.		✔
You want to have chat and chat posts be associated with a Teams site.		✔
Your meeting attendees do not correspond to the entire Teams site membership.	✔
You want meeting artifacts, such as chat messages, links and file attachments, to be contained in a Teams site.		✔

Why the potential concern with Outlook?

Consider this meeting scenario. A guest is invited to all or a portion of a confidential Teams meeting, scheduled via Outlook.

If the meeting guest is...

(1) a Marquette student, faculty or staff member and

(2) is set up for Teams calling and chat

...then the Teams meeting chat remains visible to the guest after leaving the meeting.

Also, if the meeting is a part of recurring meeting series, the Marquette guest can view the Teams meeting chat for all subsequent meetings. 

In this case, a Teams channel meeting is the best choice. Channel meetings limit meeting chat to members of the Teams site, so guests lack access to meeting chat.

When Teams meetings are scheduled via Outlook:

• Meeting chat appears in chat within Teams.
• Chat attachments appear in files in chat within Teams.
• Recording links come in an email message to person who started the recording.
• Anyone invited to meeting will have access to that meeting chat.
  • If it's a single meeting, then access is just for that meeting.
  • If it's a recurring meeting series, then access is for all subsequent meetings.

When Teams meetings are scheduled via Teams channel:

• Chat appears as posts in Teams channel; NOT in regular chat.
• Chat attachments appear in files in that channel.
• Recording links appear in that channel, making the meeting easy to join from the channel.
• Any Team member can join the meeting.
• Channel meetings enhance security. Guests invited to meetings lack access to meeting chat.
• When scheduling a channel meeting, the meeting will appear on the channel and participant calendars for all current Team members. Members who join the Team later can find the meeting in the channel, but the meeting will not automatically appear on their calendars.
• Meeting organizers can include guests as "required attendees" when scheduling a Teams channel meeting. Guests can be outside of Marquette (see the Gmail address below) or part of Marquette but not a member of the Teams site (see Iggy the Golden Eagle below).
  
  

Questions?

Please contact the IT Services Help Desk for questions about Microsoft Teams.