Your client gave you a Microsoft 365 account. Here's how to keep its meetings straight

A Microsoft 365 account from a client is the client's account, lent to you for the length of the contract, and its calendar and Teams meetings stay under their administrator's control. This guide is for freelancers and consultants who work inside a client's Microsoft 365 organisation, either with an account of their own there or as a guest, and take calls on Microsoft Teams, with the odd Google Meet invitation from elsewhere. It covers which kind of access you have, profiles, the hidden Teams link, app approval and leaving. Running several such accounts through one notetaker is covered on one notetaker for every account you hold.

Do you have a guest account or a real account in their organisation?

Check first, because the calendar lives in different places. A guest is your own existing account invited into their organisation: you can use their Teams, channels and files, but invitations arrive at your own address. A member account, you@client.com, is one they created for you inside their organisation, usually with its own mailbox and calendar.

Kind of access	Who you sign in as	Where meeting invitations land	Who controls it
Guest	Your own account	Your own calendar	You, with access to their organisation granted and removed by them
Member account	you@client.com	That account's calendar, if it has one	Their administrator, entirely

Some clients use both: a guest invitation for Teams channels, a member account for anything that needs their own address. Ask which address they will send meeting invitations to, and make sure it is one you read.

What does the client's administrator control?

Everything about a member account. They can reset its password, disable it, set its sign-in rules, and decide which apps it may connect to. Assume the administrator can see anything stored in it: mail, files, calendar. That is not suspicion; it is how a work account is meant to work.

App approval is the part freelancers trip over. Some Microsoft 365 organisations let people connect apps themselves; others require an administrator to approve each app before anyone can use it. If a notetaker, scheduler or anything else asks for access to the account and stops at an approval screen, that is the client's policy working, not a fault. Ask the client's IT contact, and expect them to ask what the app reads.

How should you set it up on your computer?

Keep each client account in its own profile, so you never reply or join as the wrong person. In a browser, a separate profile per client account for Outlook on the web and Teams on the web gives each one its own cookies and its own sign-in.

The desktop apps can hold several accounts at once, which is convenient and is also how mistakes happen. Outlook on the desktop can show several accounts' mail and calendars in one window, which is also how a reply or an invitation goes out from the wrong address. The Teams app can hold several accounts and switch between organisations you are a guest in. Before joining a client's call, check which account and organisation Teams is showing. Join as a stranger and you may wait in the lobby of your own client's meeting.

Does the account actually have a calendar?

Not always. A work account with no mailbox has no calendar. Some clients issue accounts that are licensed to sign in and use Teams but not for an Exchange Online mailbox, and then there is no inbox and no calendar behind them. Invitations for you go wherever the client sends them, which is often your own address.

The quick test: sign in to Outlook on the web with the account. If there is no mail and no calendar, the account has none, and any app that wants to read its calendar will find nothing.

Where does the Teams link hide?

Usually in the body of the invitation, sometimes behind a Join button, and rarely in the location. Meetings created as Teams meetings in Outlook carry the link in their online meeting details and again in the joining block at the bottom of the body. The location field often says only "Microsoft Teams Meeting", with no link at all. Forwarded invitations frequently keep the body and lose everything else.

There is one more disguise. Organisations that use Microsoft's Safe Links rewrite links in messages and invitations into long addresses on safelinks.protection.outlook.com, which check the destination and then redirect to the real link. The Teams link is still there, wrapped. If you copy a link out of an invitation and it looks like nonsense, that is usually why.

How do you share availability without merging calendars?

Share free/busy, not details. If the client allows it, share the client calendar with your main account at free/busy level so you see your whole week. In the other direction, block time in the client calendar with a neutral title such as "Busy", so their staff do not book over your other clients' calls. Do not copy events between accounts: a copy does not move when the meeting does, and it carries the client's details into an account they do not control.

What happens to the account when the contract ends?

The client disables it, and its mail, files and calendar go with it; a guest's access is simply removed. Plan the exit at the start. In the last week:

• Agree what you keep: typically the contract, invoices and hand-over notes.
• Disconnect any app connected to the account, and remove it from the account's app permissions as well.
• Switch off anything still scheduled from that calendar.
• Remove the account from Outlook, Teams, your browser profiles and your phone.

How does TrackHeros handle a client-issued Microsoft 365 account?

You connect it to that one client and nothing else. On the client's page in TrackHeros, choose Connect Microsoft and sign in with the client account. TrackHeros asks Microsoft for sign-in basics, offline access and read-only calendar access (Calendars.Read); nothing reads mail, files or contacts. Personal Outlook.com and Hotmail accounts connect the same way.

If the organisation requires approval, TrackHeros says: "Your organisation requires an administrator to approve TrackHeros before it can read your calendar. Ask your Microsoft 365 administrator to grant consent, then connect again." An account with no mailbox is refused at connect with a message saying it has no Outlook calendar TrackHeros can read.

Once connected, every event on the account's default calendar carrying a Microsoft Teams or Google Meet link is filed under that client, about two months ahead. Links are found in the online meeting details, the location or the body, including forwarded invitations and links wrapped by Safe Links. Changes arrive through Microsoft Graph subscriptions, renewed before they expire, with a full re-read every 15 minutes behind them; a cancellation cancels the bot. The bot joins as a participant about two minutes early, under the name set for that client, and waits in the lobby to be admitted: see the Microsoft Teams notetaker. If you are a guest and invitations land in your own calendar alongside other clients' meetings, connect that calendar as your personal one and file meetings from it instead: a personal calendar beside client calendars.

A same-client meeting that appears on both this account and a Google calendar is recognised as one meeting and gets one bot. Mixing the two providers is covered in connecting Google and Outlook calendars to one notetaker, and the Google twin of this guide is the client-issued Google Workspace account.

What happens in TrackHeros when the contract ends?

Disconnect the account on the client's page. Sync stops for that account and TrackHeros deletes its calendar subscription; your other accounts are untouched, and meetings already recorded stay filed under the client.

Two things are left to you. Microsoft offers no way for an app to revoke its own permission, so remove TrackHeros from the Microsoft account's app permissions yourself; the app reminds you when you disconnect. And upcoming meetings already synced are not cancelled: their bots stay scheduled and no longer follow reschedules, so switch auto-join off for any that remain. If the client disables the account first, the client page shows "Reconnect needed" and its sync stops.

To remove the client's meetings too, delete the client workspace. It asks you to type the client's name, then removes the recordings, transcripts and notes, including the copy held by the meeting-bot service. The promises behind that are on the privacy section of the homepage.