A new note-taking tool has just arrived in Teams meeting! Collaborative Notes are a brand-new tool that you can use for agenda, notes, tasks, and much more. It uses Microsoft Loop components and integrated both with Teams and other Microsoft 365 services. No more Wiki-based notes!
Let’s check what’s inside.
Notes in Teams
Note-taking is one of the most important parts of a meeting. Well-organized meeting notes can serve as a reference for future discussions, making it easier to recall past decisions, track progress on action items, and provide a comprehensive overview of the meeting’s outcomes.
Teams has many modern features and is heavily updated almost every month, but the note-taking feature was one of the weakest points for years. Wiki notes were very limited and allowed you to create notes during a meeting, and that’s all. Sharing options, collaboration features, follow-ups, tasks, templates – missing! OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps on the market but unfortunately, it wasn’t integrated with Teams meetings.
This month Microsoft released a completely new feature designed for note-taking. It’s called Collaborative Notes and it’s based on Microsoft Loop components. You can use it to prepare an agenda, create notes during a meeting, and work on them after the meeting. All with a modern look and feel and fantastic user experience.
Key features:
- Notes are available during an entire meeting life cycle (from scheduling the meeting to post-meeting summaries)
- Participants can use notes and work with them
- Notes component can be shared with other people
- Notes component can be copied and embedded in other M365 tools (Teams, Outlook, Word, Whiteboard)
- Changes done in one place (for example, in Word) are synced with all other places in almost real-time
Collaborative Notes
I will show you how to use Collaborative Notes from the very beginning of a meeting – scheduling. Then I will go through the invitation e-mail, the meeting itself, and post-meeting tasks. You don’t need to stick with this path and start using notes just during your meeting.
- Start creating a new Teams meeting, add attendees, and select a date. At the bottom of the screen click on Add an Agenda others can edit.
- A new Loop component appears with 3 predefined sections – Agenda, Meeting notes, and Follow-up tasks. You can use those sections, remove them, or add new ones.
- It’s a scheduling step so I created a simple agenda. When you prepare an agenda, you can send your invitation.
- Invited participants can open the meeting details and Teams, check the prepared agenda, and add their own notes or agenda topics. The loop component works similarly to a Word file – you can check who is currently working on the agenda and see changes in real time.
- When the meeting is running you can open Notes using the Notes icon on top of the meeting bar. The Notes will open on the right-hand panel. You can use them in the same way as in the scheduling meeting window. All changes are automatically synced and are visible to other participants.
- When the meeting is finished you can open the meeting details in the Teams Calendar and update notes. It is a fully functional Collaborative Notes section, and all meeting participants can go there and update or add notes. In the example below I added 3 tasks using the Tasks section.
- When you create a Task a new dedicated Planner plan is created. All assigned tasks are created in the Planner so you can monitor tasks progress, add comments, add files, etc. When a task is completed in the Planner it’s automatically checked in the Loop component as well.
More options
Collaborative Notes uses a Loop component with 3 predefined sections, but you are not limited to them. You can add more components and arrange them as you want.
You can also copy notes and use them in Teams, Outlook, or Word. This feature gives you more options to collaborate. To do that click on the Copy component icon on the loop component. Now you can paste in one of the supported tools. Right now you can use Word, Teams personal chat, e-mail messages in Outlook, and Whiteboard. More options are coming soon (for example, OneNote).
For example, if you paste the Loop component into a Word document, you can use it as documentation with always updated Notes.
Collaborative Notes are saved as Loop component files in your OneDrive in the Meeting folder. You can check your notes in this folder and manage them as any other file. Important – those files have enabled the history version. You can check versions in the History version window and restore a previous version if needed.
Summary
Collaborative Notes – it’s one of the most important features in Teams. It will change the way we use notes in Teams meetings. Now you can use one tool to prepare for the meeting, gather information and save it during the meeting, and use all that information after the meeting. All of these with almost real-time collaboration features.
Keep in mind that it’s still in the development phase and more features will come to the Collaborative Notes and Loop components. More scenarios and use cases will be available in the upcoming months.
There are also limitations at this stage:
- No integration with Teams channels chats
- OneNote is not supported
- External and guest participants cannot access meeting notes before or during the meeting
- Teams does not support channel meetings, ad hoc Meet Now meetings, and 1:1 calls
- Mobile clients do not yet support Collaborative Meeting Notes
- Each recurring meeting has its own Collaborative Notes
