Attendees in Lobby Hearing Each Other while waiting

Copper Contributor

I am a teacher at an elementary school and have had a few teachers notice something interesting happening in their Lobby. While they are working with small groups of students in their main meeting, they have the rest of their class waiting in the lobby to be admitted. 

 

Students are now back in the building, and they follow this same procedure. When waiting in the lobby, the teachers have noticed that their students can hear each other - talking, using digital resources, background noise at home, etc. The teacher in the meeting cannot hear this and only learned about it from the student perspective now that they are in person! We understand they can chat, but this is audio. 

 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9nqH11BkaQw1V5Uc6

 

Teachers are concerned about safety. Is there a setting we are missing? Or something to adjust on their end to prevent this from happening? They have made new links and it continues. Any help is appreciated!

 

13 Replies

@tdwachur Hello, when being stuck in the lobby there's nothing more to it than wait to be admitted. If you're not being admitted you will be dropped from the lobby (the official docs says 15 min, but I've heard someone in the community actually testing this saying 30 min). Anyway, you cannot hear or communicate while in the lobby. That's one of the main purpose.

 

If I should guess though, your org. hasn't really worked through all the available policies in Teams so perhaps the students are creating meetings on the side, calls and chatting as there are no boundaries set up.

 

I would like to recommend this article for configuring "safe learning" and note the tabs!
For administrators - For educators - Policy quick guide


Keeping students safe while using Teams for distance learning (microsoft.com)

@tdwachur While I agree that students should not be able to do anything while in the lobby waiting to join a meeting, I have now had this situation (students able to talk to one another) reported to me by at least two different teachers from different schools in our district.  Unfortunately, we at the district level have not been able to replicate the situation, and it is never consistent as to which students can talk while waiting in the meeting lobby.  Thankfully, our students reported it to the teacher and are practicing appropriate behavior by telling each other to mute their microphones while they wait.

 

Any help or guidance that @Microsoft can provide about this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Please read my reply above.
Thank you Christian. We have been using Teams successfully with our classes for the past year, and this situation just started happening in the last couple of weeks. The district has Teams set-up so that our students cannot create meetings or have access to Chat in Teams.
Hello, well then I'm afraid your IT hasn't set up all the necessary settings/polices as when waiting in the lobby there's nothing more to it. You can't talk to others etc. But if your IT are certain they have set up everything correct but the policies don't work as expected, then they need to open up a support ticket with Microsoft.
We have now seen this happening in many schools and grade levels across our county, so our IT support has opened a dialogue with MS Engineers.
Let us know the outcome, please.

@ChristianBergstrom

This case is in the validation phase of resolution, as MS Engineering found a bug in the tenant and has deployed a fix.

Oh my. That's quite a serious bug if you ask me. Thanks for the update.

 

Edit* I noticed that you haven't been involved in the previous conversation, can you provide the tech details from the engineers?

No, I cannot. When I pressed the issue with support, the response I got was "Our engineering team found a bug and implemented a fix for this issue." I can push for a postmortem after resolution is validated, which will be at least a week since our students are out on Spring Break.

 

I found this thread when OP submitted a ticket within our internal ticketing system and was researching the issue.  I book marked it to come back here and share resolution, since you requested it.

Hi there, did you get any further details on the fix in the end? We're having the same issue - and it's a confidentiality concern in our case.

@gemmawilson The fix was to open a support case with M365 and it ended up being an issue that required engineering to resolve it on Microsoft's side.  No further details were provided, sadly.

Ah good to know it's not a setting etc - thanks for getting back to me! We'll raise it with Microsoft.