How to Create a Proper Meeting Invitation in Skype for Business

Transcription

1 How to Create a Proper Meeting Invitation in Skype for Business Meeting invitations can only be created in Real Outlook Calendar at this time. You cannot use the web client or a web location to create a meeting. Once the meeting invitation is created you then put in the invitees addresses and they can then join the meeting by clicking on the links. If you happen to have a Lync assigned phone number (typically that means you have a Polycom phone attached to your computer in your campus office) you can create a persistent meeting invitation that can be copy/pasted into Blackboard for future use for all of your meetings. You will also notice that there are dial in telephone numbers for participants to use to call in on if they are not near a computer. (NOTE: if a participant is officially affiliated with Vanderbilt (or another Lync federated institution) they can download and install an app on their smart phone and join the meeting that way. That is different than using the call in numbers to participate. Go into real Outlook and click Calendar. Make sure you are on YOUR calendar and not someone you have delegate capabilities for. Click New Skype Meeting You will see the meeting invitation below. Notice that in my account I have Join by phone numbers. That is because I have a Lync assigned telephone number at work. You may leave this invitation as is, put in a subject and put in the addresses (separated by semicolons) of all of your participants. If the participants are Vanderbilt people (students, staff, or faculty) you should use their Vanderbilt

2 address. If they are not affiliated with Vanderbilt, use whatever address you have for them. If they are part of a Lync federated institution, such as the University of Kentucky or the University of Cincinnati, you should use that address so they may actually join inside of real Skype for Business. Then click Send. Now you may want to customize the invitation by giving more explicit directions or putting in the exact URL into the invite. You may also want to delete the forget dial-in Pin link and, if you don t want people calling in on the phone, delete the telephone numbers and Conference ID as well. To modify an invitation swipe over it with your mouse, holding down the left mouse button and copy/paste it into a blank Word document.

3 Now it is in Word. If you want to put in the full URL (not just the Join Skype Meeting link, roll over the Join Skype Meeting, right click and select Copy Hyperlink. Unfortunately you just can t paste it back into either your word document or or outlook invite because it will just display Join Skype Meeting again. Instead you will have to open a dumb editor like Notepad and paste it in there. You may right click to copy the address from either the original invitation OR the word document. When you paste it into Notepad you will see this:

4 You may then swipe over THAT and copy/paste that into your actual invitation OR the word file you copied the invitation into. I like to copy it directly under the Join Skype Meeting link. If you hit the enter key after the end of the URL it turns it too into a hyperlink.

5 You may delete the phone numbers or anything else you don t want in the invitation and add any text you want and send it out. If you are saving it as your Word invitation, you may then copy/paste the invitation into any and send it out whenever you want, as long as you have a Polycom phone or Lync assigned phone number. You may also copy/paste the invitation into Blackboard. If you do, that invitation is persistent. If you are a student who does not work at Vanderbilt you will not see phone numbers in your invitation and your invite is not persistent. You will be assigned a new URL every time you create a new meeting. If you decide to send the persistent invitation out, that time will not be automatically placed in your Outlook calendar. You will have to go in and add that manually (you can even do that through the web client). Also note that in manually created invitations, if someone attempts to join by telephone, they will get a meeting now found message UNLESS you (as the meeting leader) are logged into the meeting first. JSG: