Laurel tracks the time you spend in Teams calls, so you don’t have to.
The world has changed, and so has the way we work – video calls have replaced many face-to-face meetings and become a fundamental part of everyday work.
To make it easier to collect the time in calls, Laurel can now track Microsoft Teams calls alongside all the contextual information it can gather and predict – so you have a complete picture of how you’ve spent your day.
What information on Microsoft Teams does Laurel collect?
For any call made via Microsoft Teams, Laurel collects the following:
The first 15 attendee names (followed by the number of additional attendees)
Start time
Stop time
Duration
Which Microsoft Teams calls does Laurel collect?
Laurel collects all calls made via Microsoft Teams, including:
Peer-to-peer – a direct call between two people
Group – a call involving more than two people
Channel – a call in a specific channel, like a team or project channel
Calendered – a call from a calendar invite
External – a call including people dialing in from a different Teams account or without a Teams account
What attendee information does Laurel collect?
Three types of attendees can join an internal or external Microsoft Teams call:
Internal attendee
This is someone with a Microsoft Teams account who works at your firm. Laurel collects an internal attendee’s name and displays it in the Activity bar in your Timeline. Like so:
Conference with Jennifer Wright
External attendee
This is someone with a Microsoft Teams account joining from a different account than your firm’s. Laurel will show the number of external attendees that joined the call like this:
Conference with External attendee
Conference with 3 External attendees
Guest
This person joins as a guest rather than signing in via Microsoft Teams. Laurel will show the number of guests that joined the call like this:
Conference with Guest
Conference with 3 Guests
If a Microsoft Teams call involves all three types of attendees, Laurel lists them by hierarchy always in the same order: internal, external, and guest. Like so:
Conference with Jennifer Wright, 2 External attendees & 2 Guests
Suppose you have a Microsoft Teams call invite in your Microsoft Outlook calendar. In that case, we also collect the names of attendees listed on that invite and use them to populate an activity in your Timeline. This creates two simultaneous activities on your Timeline – one with information captured from Microsoft Teams and one with information captured from Microsoft Outlook so you can choose which activity you want to bill for.
What happens if there are more than 15 people on a call?
Laurel keeps track of everyone attending your Microsoft Teams call and includes the names or phone numbers of the first 15 attendees. After that, it simply lists the number of other attendees.
When do calls show as Activities in my Timeline?
It usually takes 1 to 3 hours. This is because of how Microsoft handles call records – essentially, it’s the latency between an event happening in Teams and the delivery of the change notification. You can learn more about this by referring to the ‘callRecord’ section in this Microsoft article.
What would appear on my Timeline if I'm on an MS Teams call that also appears in my Outlook calendar?
Both the scheduled event and the actual duration of the call will be displayed on your Timeline, helping you differentiate between planned and actual time spent on the call.
Your Timeline could illustrate this as:
8:30 - calendar icon - 30m - Meeting Title
8:31 - phone icon - 27m 13s - Meeting Title
A friendly reminder: when it comes to billing, you will want to choose just one of these activities to ensure there's no duplication.