Can admin set the default role of meeting participants to attendee instead of presenter?

Copper Contributor

Our school is working hard to get MS Teams ready to help us switch to long distance education when our school closes due to the coronacrises. We are testing Team meetings as a way to start online classes. The default settings make every participant of a meeting a 'presenter'. But we would like to give all particpants (= students) the role of attendee so the organizer of the meeting (= teacher) has more control over the meeting. It is quite labor intensive if the organizer has to change this setting for each meeting as you have to plan the meeting first before you can access the 'meeting policies' webpage after reopening the meeting in the Calendar.

 

Browsing the net I found a webpage that said that the IT admin can globally set meeting options like who needs to wait in the lobby before joining a meeting. As this is the other setting an organizer can change on the meeting policy webpage I figured that the admin should be able to set the default participant role to attendee but we can not find it in the Admin Center.

 

Can anyone assist us in this matter?

23 Replies

Hi,

 

Only the meeting organizer can set who should be a presenter or not per meeting. There is no setting for this from admin center or via policies.

 

There is a setting for who should be able to bypass the lobby "Automatically admit people", but you can only set it to Everyone, People in your Organization or People in your Organization and federated organizations. So you can't set it for different groups in your organization.

 

You could start a uservoice request at https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/

@Linus Cansby 

Hi, thanks but I hope you are not right... We have exactly the same problem as @dahgijsbers at our school. To be a bit more specific:

 

We want to use Microsoft Teams Meetings as a replacement for lessons. We tested things out a bit with some of our students, and setting up a meeting in outlook works fine, the students can join. But our problem is: all our students automatically gain presenter rights and can take over the microphone, mute other users et cetera.

 

Right now, the teacher can edit the Meeting preferences of a Meeting, and change the setting of the "Who can present?" setting. By default, this setting is set to "Everyone" and we only want to change this setting to "Just me" by default. So, as a result, teachers don't have to do this manually everytime they create a new meeting.

 

Teachers create a meeting by adding a class, and the class is a dynamic distribution list with all the student in it.

 

I still hope it's possible to set this up in Teams Admin Panel or PowerShell? Thanks in advance.

Unfortunately there is no powershell or TAC policy setting for this. The only setting you can change is per meeting and that you change in meeting options.

I have the exact same problem with @dahgijsbers ... and my situation maybe even more complicated as most of us need to start lesson in private channels, in which scheduling is not possible.

Our initial deployment is using a subject-based Teams and class-based channels inside. To make things like normal lessons, teachers are required to hold the meetings for their own class. With our initial deployment, as every lesson in NOT visible to all the team members, scheduling for channel meetings seemed not possible, so teachers need to "Meet Now" in respective channels; and in this way, they could not set the "Meeting Settings" and thus could not choose "Only me" in the "Who can present?" section. However, it is really labor intensive for colleagues to do so manually during lesson, since some would need to hold lesson with about 100 students at one time.

 

I tried to update the "Sharing content" policy for students so that sharing screen shall be "Disabled" for them, but testing shows that the student applied with the policy can still share his screen... so any way out apart from telling student to behave themselves?

@mayysyeung Yes, the teacher (as organizer) can Go to Meeting Settings and change who can be the Presenter. If you change this from "Everyone" to "Just me" the students can only see everything and can't edit.

@KoenK Thanks for your reply... But can teachers still do so if they have to use the "Meet Now" function in private channels?

@mayysyeung They can do this in private channels, but only with planned meetings (plan a meeting, click on the dots and select details, then select meeting options), but not when they use 'meet now'. We're facing the exact same problems. Because everyone is presenter by default, students are muting teachers and taking over presentations. The only thing a teacher can do during a 'meet now' meeting is:

 

Click Show participants in the meeting controls to see a list of the people in the people in the             meeting. Hover over the name of the person whose role you want to change and click More options. From there, select Make a presenter or Make an attendee

 
 
I'm really hoping that 'Attendee as default' will become an option in the global policy in the Teams admin center. 

@Daniele Ingrassia The gruesome situation is we CANNOT schedule meetings in private channels... (facepalm)

I've misread your question (private teams instead of private channels) and you're correct. That's.... really weird. I already figured out that you can't record a meeting in a private channel (which is understandable, but you can't enable it in Admin either). But not able to schedule a meeting is kinda bizar.

https://youtu.be/hGbszTKpAp8

here is the video tutorial on setting students as attendees on MS Teams-Easy way

An feature update is coming so you can set a policy with "who can present" to something else than Everyone. Rollout will begin in the first week of May.

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=63206

@Linus Cansby Where can we find the Powershell directions for doing this and, if it is set, will organizers of meetings still be able to change an attendee to a presenter during a meeting?

Hi,

 

I don't think this been released yet, but you can see the value DesignatedPresenterRoleMode if you check with Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy. But you might get a error if you try to set another value with Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy, since this update is not released yet.

 

@Deleted wrote about it here:

https://tomtalks.blog/2020/04/4-new-features-enhancing-microsoft-teams-meeting-security-and-control/

@MLederer @Linus Cansby 

I was able to execute the command:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -DesignatedPresenterRoleMode "OrganizerOnlyUserOverride"

 

But with Get-CSTeamsMeetingPolicy it still shows the 'everyone' value. I think we have to wait for a while. 

@molislaegers @Linus Cansby I was able to run Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Policy Name" -DesignatedPresenterRoleMode OrganizerOnlyUserOverride and then when I ran Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity "Policy Name" the designatedPresentRoleMode was updated. I did have a question as to whether this needed to be run for the students' policy or the teachers' policy or both. When I ran this last week I received a permission denied error which I did not get today. I'll assume because of that the PowerShell command is working now.

@Linus Cansby 
Is that true that I could only access this parameter by powershell, in other words, I cannot get this option in admin console without using powershell?

@mayysyeung That's right..

 

For now it's Powershell only