Are You Getting the Most Out of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, and Facilitator in Your Meetings? Probably not.

Most of us spend a significant amount of time in meetings. At the same time, organisations are investing more in tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Facilitator to improve meeting quality, documentation, and follow-up.

However, to get the full value from these tools, we need to choose the right type of meeting and prepare it properly.

Choose the Right Meeting Type from the Start

When you create a meeting in Microsoft Teams, there is an important difference between a channel meeting and a regular Teams meeting created from the Outlook or Teams calendar. Understanding this difference can have a major impact on where meeting information is stored, who can access it, and how easily it can be found later.

Channel Meetings

A channel meeting is connected to a specific channel in a Team, such as a project team or customer team.

There are several advantages:

• ✅ The meeting chat is saved in the channel
• ✅ The recording is stored in the Team’s shared SharePoint location
• ✅ The transcript is stored together with the other meeting materials
• ✅ Notes, documents, and summaries remain in the Team’s shared workspace
• ✅ All Team members automatically have access to the information
• ✅ Everything remains in the correct context and is easy to find, even long after the meeting has ended

Examples include:

• A project meeting held in a Teams Channel in the Project Team
• An internal meeting regarding a customer held in a Teams Channel in the Customer Team

When a meeting is held as a channel meeting, the complete history of the work is collected in one place. This makes it easier to find meeting chats, recordings, transcripts, decision-making material, and follow-up activities without searching through individual files or email messages.

Regular Teams Meetings

Regular Teams meetings are often the best choice for:

• Cross-functional meetings
• Management meetings
• One-to-one meetings
• Meetings where participants do not belong to the same Team

However, it is important to understand that recordings, transcripts, and other meeting artefacts are normally placed under the meeting organiser’s ownership.

As a result, the organiser may need to share the material with the other participants after the meeting. This takes time and can create challenges related to access, ownership, and knowledge sharing.

An Important Consideration When Using Facilitator

There is an important detail that may influence your choice of meeting type.

⚠️ Microsoft Facilitator is not currently supported in scheduled channel meetings.

If your goal is to use Facilitator to automatically assist with:

• Notes
• Decisions
• Action items
• Summaries
• Follow-up activities

you should currently choose a regular Teams meeting.

This means that selecting a meeting type often involves a trade-off.

Channel Meeting

• Best suited for information management and knowledge sharing
• Recordings, transcripts, meeting chats, notes, and documents are stored in the Team’s shared workspace
• Information is placed directly in the correct context
• Facilitator is not currently supported

Regular Teams Meeting

• Supports Facilitator
• Supports Copilot during the meeting
• Suitable when participants come from several teams or organisations
• Meeting materials are normally placed under the meeting organiser’s ownership

When planning the meeting, consider what matters most: Facilitator functionality or shared information management within the Team’s workspace.

Your Agenda Is More Important Than You Think

Regardless of which meeting type you choose, one factor affects both meeting quality and the quality of AI assistance more than almost anything else:

Always include an agenda in the meeting invitation.

A good agenda should include:

• The agenda item
• The responsible person, or owner
• The allocated time

For example:

Project Status

Owner: Anna Andersson
Time: 10 minutes

Decision on the Next Delivery

Owner: Johan Svensson
Time: 15 minutes

Risks and Dependencies

Owner: Sara Karlsson
Time: 10 minutes

A clear agenda helps both Copilot and Facilitator understand the purpose of the meeting, identify decisions, track actions, and produce better summaries.

But this is not only about AI. It is also about respecting the participants’ time.

A good agenda helps participants understand:

• Why the meeting is being held
• What will be discussed
• What is expected of them
• Whether they need to prepare anything
• When their topic will be discussed

A meeting invitation without an agenda is, in practice, just as unhelpful to Facilitator and Copilot as it is to the meeting participants. Therefore, out of respect for the meeting participants (and Facilitator and Copilot), you should from now on always provide a simple and clear agenda when inviting people to a meeting.

Key Takeaways

💡 Use channel meetings when the meeting belongs to a project team, customer team, or another established workspace where all meeting information should be stored together.

💡 Use regular Teams meetings when you need Facilitator or when participants come from several different teams or organisations.

💡 Make sure that recordings, transcripts, meeting chats, and notes are stored where they provide the greatest value to the organisation, rather than remaining with an individual meeting organiser.

💡 Always include a clear agenda with the topic, owner, and allocated time.

💡 Better preparation leads to better meetings, better AI assistance, and better follow-up.

Good meetings do not begin when the meeting starts. They begin when the invitation is sent. 🚀

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AI Note

Yes, this text was written with the help of Microsoft Copilot. No, Copilot did not wake up this morning and decide, entirely on its own, to write a well-structured post about Teams meetings. 😉

Good results from AI still depend on human experience, knowledge, and a carefully considered prompt. Microsoft Copilot helped formulate the text, but the content, perspective, and message come from the person (me) who wrote the prompt.