Introduction
This guide provides comprehensive information on creating and managing Teams meeting invitations from a Shared Mailbox (SMB) within the NHS.net platform. Improving readers‘ confidence and proficiency in using shared mailboxes for Teams meetings, ensuring secure and efficient meeting management.
A video version of this guidance is available on NHS.net Connect Academy in Viva Learning.
This guidance covers the following key areas:
- Accessing Shared Mailboxes
- Creating Teams Meeting Invitations
- Advanced Invite Options
- Teams Meeting Controls
Checking permissions on a Shared Mailbox
The Shared Mailbox (SMB) must be owned by specific users who have the necessary permissions to access and manage it, see this guidance on how to check and edit access to the SMB. https://support.nhs.net/knowledge-base/managing-shared-mailboxes/
Steps to Create a Teams Meeting Invitation from a Shared Mailbox
Quick guide steps
- Access the Shared Mailbox: Sign in to Outlook (OWA), open another mailbox, and enter the Shared Mailbox name
- Create a New Meeting: Click on the calendar icon and select “New Event“
- Set Up Meeting Details: Enter the title, date, time, and attendees. Ensure the “Teams Meeting” toggle is on
- Send the Invitation: Review and click “Send“
- Adjust Teams Meeting Options: Open the event and configure additional settings
Detailed steps
1. Access the Shared Mailbox:
- Sign in to OWA
Go to https://portal.nhs.net and log in with your NHS.net credentials.
- Open the Account Manager Menu
In the top-right corner of the screen, click on your name or profile icon.
- Select “Open another mailbox”
A search box will appear.
- Enter the Shared Mailbox Name
Type the name or email address of the Shared Mailbox you want to open. If it doesn’t auto-complete, click “Search Directory”.
- Click “Open”
The Shared Mailbox will open in a new browser tab, allowing you to work in both your personal mailbox and the shared one simultaneously
- To validate you are in the right mailbox check the URL
The URL will show the SMB email in the URL e.g. https://outlook.office.com/calendar/<EMAIL>/view/workweek when viewing the Calendar.
2. Create a New Meeting Invitation:
- Click on the calendar icon to open the calendar view
- Select “New Event” to create a new meeting
3. Set Up the Meeting Details:
- Enter the meeting title, date, and time
- Add the required attendees by entering their email addresses
- Consider if you need to invite your own account to the meeting
- Ensure the “Teams Meeting” toggle is turned on to generate a Teams meeting link. It should default on after adding attendees to the event
4. Advanced invitation configuration:
Request Responses
- Enabled (default): Attendees are prompted to send a response (Accept, Tentative, Decline), and you will receive notifications when they do
- Disabled: Attendees can still respond, but Outlook won’t prompt them to, and you will not receive any response notifications
Allow Forwarding
- Enabled (default): Attendees can forward the meeting invite to others, who can then join the meeting
- Disabled: The “Forward” option is removed from the invite, preventing attendees from sharing it with others. Only the organiser can add more participants
This does not stop someone pasting the meeting invitation into another message, email or invite to send to people
Hide Attendee List
- Enabled: Attendees cannot see who else is invited—only the organiser sees the full list. Useful for privacy or large meetings
- Disabled (default): All attendees can see the full list of invitees in the meeting details
5 . Send the Invitation:
- Review the meeting details and click “Send” to distribute the invitation to all attendees
6. Adjust Teams Meeting Options:
After sending the invitation, open the event again and click on “Meeting options” to configure additional settings for the Teams meeting.
Set at least one co-organiser, ideally two or more
- In the “Roles” section, in the “choose co-organisers” menu select from the participants list the relevant people to be co-organisers. Then press Save
- Typically, this would be facilitators, chairs and leads for the meeting
- Consider setting presenter roles. In the “Roles” section, in the “who can present” menu section it may be best to change from “everyone” to “people in my org and guests” or “Specific people”
- Typically, you set this to make those “unselected” accounts which join the meeting have the role of attendee. They will not be able to share their screen, mute other participants or remove other meeting participants from the in-progress meeting
- Adjust “who can admit from the lobby”
- If you have not adjusted who the presenters are above, then consider changing from default of “organiser, co-organiser and presenters” to “Organisers and co-organisers”
- Consider adjusting “who can bypass the lobby” from the default of “people in my org and guests” to “people who were invited”
- Allow Reactions – you may wish to disable Reactions, dependant on the meeting content and formality
There are many other controls, and new controls being added all the time, so please review the controls and adjust to the needs of your meeting. Please see this Microsoft article explaining all the Teams Meeting options available, note some features may require additional licensing, such as Teams Premium. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/meeting-options-in-microsoft-teams-53261366-dbd5-45f9-aae9-a70e6354f88e
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The recording will store in the OneDrive of the NHS.net account which started the meeting recording, regardless of that account being an owner or member of the SMB.
When creating meetings from SMBs as detailed above, the SMB is the organiser of the meeting, so when owners/members of the SMB leave, the new owners/members of the SMB will be able to manage the meeting. It would be recommended to add those new accounts to the meeting and ensure they are added as co-organisers to the Teams Meeting Options screen.
SMB’s cannot create a Town hall or Webinar. A normal user account creates the Town Hall or Webinar and then distributes either the invite or the registration page through their regular communication methods, such as SMB, intranet, webpage or newsletter. As an example large organisations have their internal comms team schedule the All Staff Briefing in this way. The Internal Comms person, using their regular user account creates the Town hall. They set the co-organiser and the presenter roles (both internal and external contacts) and then distributes the invite via their internal comms SMB, intranet site and email newsletters.
Additional reading for Local Administrators or power users
- Please read the following information from Microsoft relating to SMB’s limited features for Teams meetings, intended for IT admins > https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/troubleshoot/meetings/teams-meeting-with-shared-mailboxes
- The key point is that Breakout Rooms will never be possible from a Shared Mailbox created Teams meeting.
- Please read the following information from Microsoft relating to Teams Meeting recording changes, intended for IT admins > https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/tmr-meeting-recording-change
| Last Reviewed Date | 28/08/2025 |
