How Microsoft Teams meeting notes work (and where they fall short)
Microsoft Teams has two built-in note options: collaborative notes and Copilot AI summaries. Here's how each works, where they fall short, and what to use instead.
Tassia O'Callaghan
Microsoft Teams meeting notes give you two built-in options: collaborative notes that anyone in the meeting can edit, and AI-generated summaries if your organization has a Copilot license. Neither is automatic by default, and neither solves what happens after the meeting ends.
Microsoft has built more note-taking capability into Teams over time, and Copilot adds AI-generated summaries for those who have it. But there's still a gap between capturing what happened and doing something with it. This article covers what's available, what each option does well, and where the limitations are. This is most relevant for team leads, account managers, and anyone who runs regular external meetings where what gets decided on the call needs to turn into action afterward.
How Teams meeting notes work
Teams has two built-in approaches to meeting notes. The first is collaborative notes, a shared document that anyone in the meeting can edit before, during, or after the call. It's stored as a Microsoft Loop page, linked to the calendar event and the meeting chat. Anyone invited to the meeting can access it, and changes save automatically.
It's useful for structured meetings where someone is running the agenda and logging decisions as they're made. It doesn't record anything, generate a transcript, or produce a summary. Someone still has to type into it.
The second option is AI-generated notes, which does require transcription. When enabled, Teams uses the meeting transcript to generate an automatic summary and log action items in the Notes tab. This is stored in Loop alongside the collaborative notes and is visible to all internal participants. The catch is that AI-generated notes require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to enable, which is an additional cost on top of a standard Teams subscription and sits at the enterprise tier of licensing.
For those who have it, Copilot is genuinely useful. It summarizes the meeting, flags key decisions, and surfaces action items. Because it's embedded in the Microsoft stack, notes can flow into Outlook, SharePoint, and other 365 tools without any extra steps.
According to Lucien George, Product Engineer at Fyxer, Copilot's inconsistency is actually where the opportunity lies for third-party tools: "Copilot's quality is inconsistent. Structured meetings work well, but fast-moving conversations and calls with multiple speakers are where it tends to break down. Users often ask why they'd need another tool when Copilot is bundled in, but that's exactly the gap.”
The quality varies depending on the meeting. Copilot handles structured discussions well. Fast back-and-forth exchanges, calls with several speakers, or heavily technical conversations tend to produce less reliable output. Some users find it misattributes who said what, or misses action items phrased indirectly. That's workable, but it means treating the output as a first draft rather than a finished record.
George adds: "When it does work inside the Microsoft stack, the ecosystem advantage is real. Notes can flow into Outlook, SharePoint, and other 365 tools without friction. That's genuinely useful for teams that are fully committed to the Microsoft environment.”
Notes don't automatically reach your CRM, draft a follow-up email, or connect to tools outside 365. If your workflow extends beyond Microsoft, that's a real gap. The Fyxer vs Microsoft Copilot 365 comparison covers this in more detail.
The IT department problem
This is the friction point that catches a lot of people trying to use a third-party notetaker with Teams: Microsoft's IT controls.
"Teams is the toughest platform for notetakers to work with," explains Lucien. "Microsoft keeps the ecosystem pretty locked down, and company IT departments frequently block third-party tools from joining calls altogether. It's the biggest friction point for anyone evaluating notetaker apps in a Microsoft-first environment.”
Teams is built on a relatively closed ecosystem. Many organizations, particularly larger ones, have IT policies that block external applications from joining Teams meetings. A third-party notetaker bot that works fine in Zoom might not be able to connect to a Teams call if the organization's admin settings don't allow it.
Microsoft has commercial reasons to keep the Teams ecosystem contained. The fix usually involves either getting IT to whitelist the specific application, or using a notetaker that captures audio directly from your device rather than joining the call as a participant. Check with your IT team before committing to a tool, because this question determines what's actually possible in your environment.
Third-party options for Teams meeting notes
For those with the freedom to use external tools, there are two broad approaches.
The first is a bot-based tool. It joins your Teams meeting as a participant, records the audio, and processes it afterward. These tools generally produce more structured outputs than Copilot, with explicit action items, summaries, and follow-up email drafts. The limitation is the IT access issue above.
The second is a device-side capture tool. It records from your microphone and speaker rather than joining the meeting itself. This sidesteps the IT gatekeeper issue and works regardless of platform. The trade-off is that audio quality depends on your setup, and it won't have access to metadata like attendee names.
Tools like Fyxer sit in this space and go beyond transcription, connecting meeting notes to your email workflow so that follow-ups are drafted and ready to send.
Why manual notes don't solve this
A lot of Teams users default to typing into the collaborative notes tab during calls, or keeping a doc open alongside the meeting window. Splitting your attention between a conversation and a document means you're only partly in both.
The moments you'll miss while typing are usually the ones worth capturing. A decision made quickly toward the end. A commitment someone made offhand. The context behind an action item that determines whether it gets done correctly. Writing up notes after the call trades the attention problem for a memory problem: what you write an hour later is a partial reconstruction.
The consistent failure mode, whatever approach people try, is that notes get captured but don't get acted on. Research from Fellow's State of Meetings 2024 found that just over half of workers have had to work overtime to make up for hours lost to meetings, rising to 67% for director-level and above. Data from the 2026 Fyxer Admin Burden Index backs this up: office workers lose over an hour each day to avoidable admin tasks, like meeting follow-up, including writing up notes and sending summaries.
Meetings don't reliably produce progress, and notes that nobody acts on don't change that.
A short follow-up email within an hour of the call is more valuable than a thorough set of notes sitting in the Teams tab. Not a full transcript. Just what was decided, who owns what, and by when. That takes two minutes if the notes are structured, or seconds if a tool has drafted it. For more on the broader admin cost of letting this slip, see how hidden admin slams the brakes on business growth.
Where Teams meeting notes are saved
For collaborative notes, the Loop page is linked to the calendar event and accessible from the meeting chat. You can find it by opening the Teams calendar, selecting the meeting, and clicking the Notes tab. It's also accessible from the meeting recap after the call ends.
AI-generated Copilot summaries appear in the same recap view alongside the transcript. Both are stored in Loop and tied to OneDrive, which means they follow your organization's retention and compliance policies rather than sitting in the Teams chat history.
If you're using a third-party tool like Fyxer, notes are stored in that tool's dashboard. Depending on the integration, they can also feed directly into your email workflow after the meeting.
Getting from Teams meeting notes to something that actually drives action
Microsoft Teams is the most restricted of the main platforms when it comes to third-party notetaking tools. Collaborative notes are available to everyone and useful for structured meetings. Copilot's AI summaries go further but sit behind enterprise licensing.
For organizations where Copilot is fully rolled out, it's worth using, especially if you're already working inside the 365 environment. For teams that need cross-platform notes, more structured action items, or integration with tools outside Microsoft, a third-party option is likely to serve you better.
Sort out the IT access question early, before you've committed to anything. And whichever tool you use, the habits around what happens after the meeting matter more than the software.
Microsoft Teams meeting notes FAQs
Does Teams automatically take meeting notes?
Not by default. Collaborative notes are available to all Teams users but require someone to type into them. AI-generated notes, which summarize the meeting automatically using a transcript, require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to enable. Once turned on for a meeting, AI notes generate automatically and appear in the meeting recap after the call.
Where are Microsoft Teams meeting notes saved?
Meeting notes in Teams are stored as Microsoft Loop pages, linked to the calendar event and the meeting chat. You can access them from the Teams calendar by selecting the meeting and opening the Notes or Recap tab. They're also available in the meeting chat. Because they're stored in OneDrive, they follow your organization's retention policies rather than the Teams chat history, which means they persist even after the chat thread becomes harder to find.
Can I take Teams meeting notes without a Copilot license?
Yes. Collaborative notes are included with standard Microsoft 365 plans at no extra cost. They allow any meeting participant to add agenda items, type notes during the call, and assign follow-up tasks. What you won't have without a Copilot license is an automatically generated AI summary or transcript-based action items. Third-party notetakers can fill that gap, subject to your IT team's settings on external app access.
How do I share Teams meeting notes with participants?
Collaborative notes are automatically accessible to everyone invited to the meeting, so there's no need to share them separately. For AI-generated Copilot summaries, these appear in the meeting recap and can be shared from within Teams.
The most reliable method for external participants, who can't access the Loop page, is a follow-up email summarizing what was decided and what happens next. If you're using Fyxer's notetaker, it can draft that follow-up email automatically based on the meeting content.
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