SOLVED

More options as Teams meeting organizer, e.g. mute all participants

Bronze Contributor

After hosting some meetings using Teams, I recognize it's really annoying when someone of the participants with noisy background sound doesn't mute his microphone.

 

How / when can we start using the "mute all participants" functionality? Are other features for meeting organizers also planned?

31 Replies
best response confirmed by Harold van de Kamp (Bronze Contributor)
Solution

Hey Harold, 

The 'Mute All Participants' feature is coming this quarter. 

We're just hitting this issue too. Some of our users tried to run a mass presentation in Teams - wanting to be clever about the nicer collaboration features and introducing all participants to the wider functionality - but the result, with 100+ participants was a bit of a debacle as each new attendee automatically had audio enabled and many tried to activate video resulting in a very disruptive experience and gradual degeneration of the video/audio quality.

Is there a way to force a Teams meeting to open in the Skype for Business client (I'm thinking of the ?SL=1 means of forcing an S4B meeting to open in the browser) or any other way to 'hack' the participant options for a meeting?

Also interested if there is a means of recording Teams meetings?

Has this issue been resolved yet?

HI everyone! 

 

We wanted to let you all know that this requested feature is now live!

 

Mute someone in a meeting

Mute individual meeting participants straight from the meeting roster to cut down on background noise. If someone has been muted, they'll get a notification letting them know. They'll be able to unmute themselves if they need to chime in.

Mute everyone in a meeting

If you ever need to mute all the other participants in a meeting, head to your meeting roster and select Mute all. Each individual will get a notification and be able to unmute themselves if they need to.

 

Enjoy!

While this is a good feature it is also highly annoying that it doesn't work with USB headsets with audio controls such as the Plantronics Blackwire 300 DA which at least on Skype conference calls mutes but when you press the mute button on the headset it unmutes in Skype, this doesn't work for Teams. I don't know if it might work if Skype isn't running but our organisation uses both and likely will do until Skype is discontinued.

Hi, Is it possible currently in MSFT Teams to join meeting in Mute mode (like SFB client)

Hi, how about unmuting the users who I've just muted?

Agree that that would be incredibly useful! Why is Teams out at the moment? It's clearly nowhere near finished. At the very least, you'd think it would be able to do all of the things that Skype can do! How frustrating that you can mute your meeting guests but not unmute them!

Wouldn't un-muting possible cause a privacy concern. A user knows they are muted, have a private side conversation and you un-mute them to eavesdrop?

I too am having a problem problem, but not with muting.  The problem I'm having is if I am the meeting organizer and invite others, I can mute them, but I cannot un-mute one of those attendees at a time.  I have some people that aren't tech savvy and it would be easier if I can control their mic and un-mute them to respond to a question.  The mute button is dim and I cannot un-mute a particular user.  As a matter of fact, I don't believe I can even un-mute all.

 

Am I missing something?


Thank you,
Javier

@javornelas You are not missing anything with regard to the mute button being unavailable to unmute a user.  Being able to un-mute someone would allow you to invade their privacy and eaves drop on them when they believed they were muted.  There should be NO solution that allows a host to un-mute a user due to this privacy concern.

 

There could be a solution where you can request a user to un-mute, and they receive a pop up on their screen that states who is asking them to un-mute and gives them a simple user interface to activate their audio (for the tech challenged as you state).

@Migs 

 

Thank you very much for your response.  I definitely understand what you're saying.  I was hoping that since I was the organizer of the meeting, I could take control for them.  They want as little to worry about as possible.  


Thanks again, I really appreciate your response.


Javier

@Migs 

 

I forgot to mention that in Skype for Business, the meeting organizer has the ability to mute and un-mute all or even one person at a time.  I assumed (wrongly, it appears) that since Teams would be replacing Skype for Business, that the options from Skype would carry over.


MS must have gotten feedback on this and changed it for Teams.

That is by far the stupidest thing I have ever heard. If a user is in a meeting means they are following the meeting and not talking to their wife or co worker or bank. lol you know thee is something wrong when people actually start writing about privacy even about meetings you join my friends !! lol@Migs 

@Sarki007 - your opinion would change drastically if you were a teacher trying to quickly master Teams in times of remote schooling due to global pandemic. Muting all users and allowing them to talk only when asked is essential, kids love to talk and they are unstoppable without an enforceable policy.

@thewojtek 

I am currently assisting someone who needs to engage in remote schooling as well and we run into the same problem. Is there maybe a way to implement a feature that, after having muted everyone, would allow a participant to request permission to speak again?

I think this should be rather easy to add and it would help a lot to make a Teams chat with children more structured and organized.

@javornelas I agree that the organizer should be able to unmute all participants. This is a basic feature of all other meeting/webinar software programs I have used. It is useful to unmute all participants at the beginning of the discussion point of a meeting, after a presentation for example, or to mute all briefly when people are first joining the meeting and there's a lot of background noise, but then people need to contribute once the meeting gets started. 

@vermont2039 In my opinion the mute function should have a host side control and a guest side control that work independently.  Both would need to be unmuted to work.  There should be a request to talk / raise hand feature going in both directions whereas a host can request a response from guest or a guest can request a response from a host when the other is muted.

@dlbzone Perfect solution, I hope someone from MS does read this.

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Harold van de Kamp (Bronze Contributor)
Solution

Hey Harold, 

The 'Mute All Participants' feature is coming this quarter. 

View solution in original post