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ChrisM1275's avatar
ChrisM1275
Copper Contributor
Mar 18, 2024

Discrepancy in Teams Meeting Links Between Staff and Attendees

As the IT director of a private school serving 200 students, we've been utilizing MS Bookings for the past two years to manage our online Parent-Teacher Conferences (PTC). However, this month, without changing any settings in the configuration, we've encountered a significant issue. The Teams meeting link in our staff calendar differs from the link sent out in the confirmation emails received by our customers.

 

Essentially, staff members adding appointments to their Teams calendars are directed to one meeting room, while attendees accessing the link provided in their confirmation emails are directed to a different meeting room. This inconsistency has led to huge confusion and inconvenience for both our staff and the families we serve.

 

Initially, I attributed the problem to a glitch, as parents found themselves waiting indefinitely in the lobby while staff members were unable to see them in the designated meeting room. However, upon closer examination, it became evident that the discrepancy lay in the links themselves.

Upon conducting research, it appears that many other business users are encountering the same issue, but I don’t see any reference to an explanation. I can confirm that no changes were made to these meetings on our end; they were not edited or rescheduled, the problem seemed to arise spontaneously and on a large scale. To circumvent the issue, each teacher had to manually send the correct link from their calendars to every family, amounting to approximately 200 families.

 

If you find yourself facing a similar challenge, I invite you to join me in this discussion and share your thoughts/tips. Additionally, I would like to inquire with Microsoft: has this bug been identified and is there a resolution in progress? Users have been consistently reporting this issue since 2022.

  • TomLa101's avatar
    TomLa101
    Copper Contributor

    i'm also having the same issue with Microsoft Booking.

    We have been using MS Booking Calendar to coordinate virtual meetings with our clients since last year. I have receive a lot of feedbacks from our staffs that their virtual meeting info are different from the meeting info in the confirmation email that our clients receives. In some cases, the client's virtual meetng info would send to a meeting lobby that's different from our staff.

     

    I've done some searching, and the original poster from this thread (Meetings made with Microsoft Bookings sometimes results in external - Microsoft Community) was having the same issue. A Microsoft Moderator did post some suggestions, possible solutions, but they did not worked for me.

     

    I hope that Microsoft Teams Engineering Team would look into this and rectify this bug.

    • ChrisM1275's avatar
      ChrisM1275
      Copper Contributor
      Thank you for your reply. I was hoping that turning off the meeting lobby in Teams would resolve the issue for our next round of meetings. But after reading the thread you referenced, it seems that this is not a solution. Did you also try this?

      It's disappointing that the Microsoft product team hasn't thoroughly investigated this major issue. Until it's resolved, we'll need to discontinue using this app.
      I haven't even received a reply from them.
      • srollins6's avatar
        srollins6
        Copper Contributor

        ChrisM1275 We have been utilizing Microsoft Bookings for our prospective student advisement for over 70 academic programs. We have had this same issue across all of our Bookings pages. We have not made modifications to our services our edited the Teams link either. Yet, our students are getting sent a separate link than the staff assigned to the service. 

         

        Students are calling saying we are not attending our meetings, which then gives a negative experience. I would like to see a solution to this as well. We meet with roughly 4000 prospective students a year. This is not the experience we want our students having. 

         

        Please fix! 

    • ChrisM1275's avatar
      ChrisM1275
      Copper Contributor

      Hi srollins6, we're experiencing the same issue and appreciate you bringing it up in the feedback portal. I'll stay tuned for any updates.

      We really like the product—it's saving us a lot of time. Hopefully, they'll address this soon!

       

       

  • ChrisM1275's avatar
    ChrisM1275
    Copper Contributor
    To provide a clearer demonstration, I wanted to share the links.

    This link was embedded in the staff calendar and provided to the attendees when they started to reach out with the issue so that they can join the meeting.
    https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZjE1NTFhNjUtOGYzYi00NGUxLWEwOTgtNmVlZWYwMDY0O...

    And this the link was included in the automatic meeting invite and in the automatic reminder sent 24h before the meeting; this is the one they used, and it directed users to an empty meeting room. I was also directed to an empty room. But it's working well now!
    Apparently, this is also the link to use from a mobile web browser (?).

    https://visit.teams.microsoft.com/webrtc-svc/api/route?tid=542eb69e-f2cc-43e6-b9ce-d50faaf021df&conv...

    Could this be some sort of synchronization issue/bug with Microsoft servers making it impossible to resolve the link which contains many parameters?
    I really don't understand what can cause this discrepancy, especially when the links are working well the days after.
    Thank you for your help
  • Samduck's avatar
    Samduck
    Copper Contributor

    Thank you for posting this.  We are having the same problem.  We use this app for meeting with clients.  What is confusing is that it is not happing 100% of the time.  I really hope Microsoft can address this soon. ChrisM1275 

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