JioMeet is a meeting and collaboration tool by Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio. It was first launched in July 2020, when companies and individual users worldwide switched to remote work and demand for online meeting tools skyrocketed. At that time, we had noted that JioMeet revisited the tried-and-tested features introduced by Zoom, albeit with its UI take. Almost a year after its launch, JioMeet announced an integration for its erstwhile competitor, Microsoft Teams.
A bit about Reliance Jio: the company was founded in 2015 and has rapidly grown to become India’s largest mobile network operator. Indeed, it is the third-largest operator worldwide regarding subscribers and provides various products in both consumer and enterprise segments. In 2020, a nearly 33% equity stake in the company was sold by its parent organisation, the Reliance Industries conglomerate, to raise $23 billion.
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JioMeet announced its Microsoft Teams integration in May of 2021. “The journey started in late 2020 with a set of team members from Microsoft and Reliance Jio partnering together remotely to make this happen in a concise period,” mentioned Nagaraj Konaguthi from JioMeet in a blog launching the product. Thanks to the integration, you can now conduct JioMeet meetings and make JioMeet calls without leaving the Teams environment. Let us review the app in detail.
Inside JioMeet for Teams
JioMeet is a free app for consumers, which means that you can directly download it from Microsoft AppSource and install it in your Teams environment. Here are the key features that it enables:
- The JioMeet bot – The JioMeet app experience in Teams operates primarily through a conversational interface. Once you have downloaded JioMeet, you will be greeted by the JioMeet bot, which can understand simple commands like start, join, help, and log out. You can also qualify a command with further descriptors – e.g., start, followed by the meeting topic.
- Start and join meetings from Teams – You can type in the start command to instantly initiate a JioMeet meeting session in Teams. When you type in the start, the bot will generate a meeting ID, a meeting password, and a join-in link. By default, the topic name for instant meetings is set as “topic”, but you can change this by typing in start <<topic name>> into the bot conversation. And, if someone else has started an instant meeting and you have the meeting ID, you will be able to join in via the bot. Type in join followed by the 10-digit meeting ID, and the JioMeet bot will generate the join-in link.
- Planning scheduled meetings – In addition to the JioMeet bot, there is the JioMeet messaging extension that allows you to schedule meetings for the future. When you click on the JioMeet icon below the message compose area, it will open the planning window where you can enter details like meeting date, time, duration, topic, and time zone. If you have more than one calendar installed, JioMeet will ask you to choose the calendar with which you would like to sync your meeting schedule.
- My Meetings list – The My Meetings feature of the JioMeet Teams app will list all your scheduled meetings – both recurring and one-off sessions. You will be able to see the meeting topic, the meeting time, the ID, and the name of the host for each session. If you want, you can choose to launch the meeting directly from the My Meetings module or plan a future session.
- Advanced meeting configurations for hosts – When scheduling a JioMeet meeting, you can set meeting rules – for example, you can enable a waiting room where participants gather before the meeting starts. Meeting participants can be allowed to or restricted from joining before the host, and you may limit the meeting from external or guest users entirely.
Why the JioMeet App for Teams Makes a Difference
JioMeet offers an incredibly seamless calling and meeting experience for Teams users. The bot-based interface minimises the learning curve, and you can gain from some of the more advanced features without getting bogged down by complex configurations.
What We Think
To use JioMeet effectively in Teams, ensure you have associated it with the right team, chat, or user group, where you are most likely to require meeting functionalities. Apart from this, JioMeet offers a compelling alternative to Teams’ built-in meeting system, mainly if you are an existing customer. You can download the app here.
