I use Google Workspace for my businesses and have come to the conclusion that Google Meet is now good enough compared to standalone options. But many suppliers and clients use Microsoft 365 and there are quite a few who are blocked from joining calls on other systems. This is awkward. I like to meet people where they are anyway, so I wanted to figure out if there was a way of using Microsoft Teams within Google Calendar and not have it be a total faff.

There is an official and relatively straightforward way to do this with the (paid) Microsoft Teams Essentials plan and the Microsoft Teams Meeting Google Workspace add-on.

With an active subscription and the add-on installed in Google Workspace, it’s possible to set Microsoft Teams as the video conferencing option in meetings created via Google Calendar. Invitations come from your usual address and the event appears alongside everything else, rather than hidden away in Teams.

There’s now a solid guide from Microsoft on how to set this up, which saves me writing one. Hurrah. The only thing the guide doesn’t cover is adding a custom domain to Microsoft 365, which is necessary to appear as user@yourcompany.com in meetings, rather than user@yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com. Only the very first step (verification, which I did via TXT record) is necessary. Going beyond this and changing MX records will send your email to Microsoft instead of Google, which you almost certainly don’t want.

There are a few caveats to bear in mind.

1. It won’t work with a (free) personal Teams account because the add-on requires a Microsoft work account.
2. Meetings you schedule with the Teams meeting add-on will only appear on your Google Calendar. This is what I wanted, but I can see it being a potential issue for those who spend a lot of time in Teams.
3. It doesn’t seem possible to schedule a Teams meeting in this way with the macOS Calendar app: you have to use Google Calendar in a browser, which is a bit annoying if you’re in the habit of using the macOS app.
4. Various features are not available: meeting and AI notes, passcode generation, and Copilot.

Also, you’ll probably end up spending more time using Teams. Sorry.

How I got here

Setting this up was oddly tortuous and I suspect that this is down to there not being good documentation from Microsoft in place when I started out.

Before I started trying to solve this properly, I had a completely separate Google Workspace account and a separate Microsoft Teams Essentials for Business account. This had the benefit of being simple, but it sucked. Better than not being able to handle Teams calls properly but using an alternative domain for Teams was confusing for everyone.

My first effort was trying to LLM my way into a solution. This went very wrong. I ended up going down a rabbit hole of fiddling with email routing rules across both systems and paying for a full M365 subscription for a month to see if I could get it working. What I got was essentially a retread of this guide, but more confusing and with no real end state in mind. I would have backed out earlier if I’d been working from the guide rather than a stepped conversational approach and I eventually had to unwind everything anyway, after I killed email delivery for a few hours. Good times.

It was only when I fell back to doing some serious messageboard hunting that I found the Google Workspace add-on.

Lesson: research first, plan second, act third.