Forum Discussion
I am the meeting organizer, but Teams will not allow me to access Meeting Options
I want to take the time to document all this nicely, but I never find the time. So here is a brief, I cannot be sure if it is the same issue as yours, nor have I time to carefully verify all this, but I thought I’d share it anyway in case it is helpful. Please let me know!
If my assumptions are correct, I believe that this issue arises because of a bug in the "Teams Meeting add-in for Microsoft Outlook".
How it happens
It occurs when you schedule a meeting using the Outlook desktop calendar, and in Outlook desktop you have more than one Microsoft 365 Organization account (Exchange Online “EO” account). You also have the Teams desktop app installed, and signed into your primary account. You have a default EO account, but you create a Teams calendar meeting in a secondary account (or any other than your default).
Symptoms
When you create a meeting in this way, you create what I “technically” call a “dud meeting”. With a dud meeting:
- If you try to join it at any time you will get the message “When the meeting starts, we’ll let people know you’re waiting.” – even though you may be the meeting host.
- If you try to change the dud meeting “meeting options” you will get the message “Only meeting organisers can make changes” – even though you may be the meeting organiser. It will even state there the correct username.
Workaround
The workaround is, to avoid the use of the “Teams Meeting add-in for Microsoft Outlook”. A simple way to do this is to only create Teams meetings using the calendar within Teams itself (when logged in to the relevant account), using Teams web app, or perhaps the desktop app.
Why it happens (maybe)
I believe this issue occurs due to account-specific data that is transacted and compiled between the Teams desktop app and the “Teams Meeting add-in for Microsoft Outlook” at the point it attempts to schedule the meeting. Somewhere there is an assumption that connects the identity information to your default Outlook org / EO account. Even if you have a secondary EO calendar set up in Outlook desktop and you create the Teams meeting in that Outlook desktop calendar, the Teams meeting that is created in that secondary EO calendar has some kind of identity meta data that is from your primary account, not the secondary account. Thus “primary account” is the “organiser” (regardless of what it says). That account does not belong in this secondary organisation, so it is invalid. You can’t join that meeting, or administrate it.
You are absolutely correct about the phenomenon. This is exactly what happens to me. And I suspect your assumption about the bug in the Teams Add-On for Outlook is also correct.
A year and a half later and Microsoft hasn't fixed it. I still have the same problem.
- ChrisMooreGBOct 26, 2022Copper Contributor
JimbotronInteresting to see your experience reinforcing that of @StevenMunden !
- JimbotronOct 26, 2022Copper Contributor
I think the fact that the Teams client doesn't allow more than one enterprise O365 account is an indicator of the root of the problem.
Microsoft assumed people will only ever use Teams with one and only one enterprise O365 account. So, the Outlook add-on just assigns the meeting organizer based on the account you've used to log in to the Teams client, rather than the account/calendar where you create the meeting in Outlook. The weird thing is that the correct account shows up as the organizer when you view the meeting in the Teams client, but it tells you you're not the organizer if you try to change settings, and it won't let you start the call. This has led to many frustrating experiences for my customers, and is not a good look.
In the end, I uninstalled the Teams client. I use teams only from within Edge. And I create calendar meetings only from within Teams within Edge. Until they fix this bug, it's the safest way to avoid having a meeting with all of your clients waiting and you can't start it.
- ChrisMooreGBOct 27, 2022Copper ContributorAgreed, Microsoft's bizarre assumption that people will only use Teams within a single 365 tenant was a huge failure at the design stage, and has resulted in a raft of problems as well as huge inconvenience to users having to log out of and into different tenants to access them.
I've had issues with Edge InPrivate instances not fully isolating authentications to different 365 tenants, although Chrome Profiles handle this fine. Maybe I should test that in Edge again since both browsers are now so closely related. I can't recall whether I last tested this in Edge's early or pre-Chromium days!