How to Assign the Co-Organizer Role to Microsoft Teams Meetings

[Tony Redmond]

Microsoft Teams is introducing a new co-organizer role for meetings. The role allows people to share the workload involved in managing complex meetings, like webinars. The role is optional and likely to be used in a small minority of Teams meetings. Even so, it’s a useful feature to have available when you’re planning a large and complex meeting.

https://office365itpros.com/2021/11/22/assign-co-organizer-role-microsoft-teams-meetings/

[#2]

This is a much-requested feature. Thanks for posting.

[#3]

Unfortunately this role will not be able to do the things that we desperately need a co-organizer to do.....
They won't be able to:
Create and manage breakout rooms.
View and download attendance reports.
Edit the meeting invitation.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

@Rae Jobst Hello, these are the details of the co-org role.

Co-organizers can do the following:

• Access and change meeting options
• Bypass the lobby
• Admit people from the lobby during a meeting
• Lock the meeting
• Present content
• Change another participant’s meeting role
• End the meeting for all
• Create & manage breakout rooms
  To make co-organizers breakout room managers, you must first assign them the breakout room manager role.

Co-organizers cannot do the following:

• Create & manage breakout rooms (updated, see above)
• View & download attendance reports
• Manage the meeting recording
• Edit the meeting invitation
• Remove or change the Organizer role

Appoint breakout rooms managers

[#5]

Thanks for the link @ChristianJBergstrom - some Breakout Room functionality has updated since I last looked!

[#6]

@ChristianJBergstrom is it possible to make a person out of the organisation to be a Co-Organizer? 

[#7]

No, I'm afraid not. To qualify for the co-organizer role, an invitee must be using an account that is on the same tenant as the organizer’s account.

[#8]

Who can edit the meeting options to assign a Co-Organizer? I asume only the account that created the meeting? And with a teams/office license assigned to the account?

Let me elaborate with a common (i think) scenario.

Multiple management assistants with Office licenses were used to creating meetings for management through a shared mailbox ("planning assistant"). This Shared mailbox however consists of a disabled account without an office license.
Now these meetings have to change to teams meetings. That works fine but options can only be changed by this shared mailbox account (organizer) so options cannot be changed.
The only solution is to assign a Teams/office license but still when I want to open the options the context in which you logon needs to be this shared mailbox account.

Does this sound familiar? and is there a real solution for it? thanks in advance

[#9]

@Paul_van_Rijn An online meeting has to have an owner. The owner could be the assistant who schedules the meeting on behalf of another person, who can then become a co-organizer. However, the organizer still owns the meeting and they can't transfer that responsibility to someone else. It's a different way of working - Teams is not Outlook and Outlook is not Teams.

[#10]

@Tony Redmond  It's not a problem that a meeting needs to have one owner. It's a problem that we can't assign permissions that are equal to the owner role to someone else. The owner can work part time, the owner can get sick or temporary unavailable. All valid scenario's for which you want to have a proper backup organizer.

[#11]

Agree that it would be awesome if you could change the organizer but still you can set up a meeting without the organizer present by using Teams meeting roles/Teams meeting options. Co-org. Role just makes it even simpler. Have a look at the support docs.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/roles-in-a-teams-meeting-c16fa7d0-1666-4dde-8686-0a0bfe16...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-...

[#12]

That is during the meeting, most of things needed are covered with the co-org role. What is lacking are options before the meeting. Especially with a webinar and shared responsibility or the owner not being there all the time.

[#13]

I understand, but that doesn't take away from the issue that Teams doesn't support the rich array of delegate permissions which are available in Outlook, or that a meeting involves more resources than Outlook (the meeting space, attendance report, recordings, and so on), stored in different repositories with different permission models. Hence my remark that you can't take what works in Outlook and expect it to work in Teams. What you can do is work with Teams to leverage the way the software works. For instance, you could create a user account and use it to perform all the shared scheduling. Give access to that account to those who need to schedule and manage meetings. They'll need to sign into the account to perform this work, but it will work. It's just that you can't use a shared account.

[#14]

The very idea of these available options is to set them up before the meeting, so of course they can be predefined.

[#15]

Those would be the 'fixed' options of a webinar (date, location, invitation url, form). Regretfully those fixed options change and only the owner can change them. Which is problematic if that person isn't available (parttime or sickness).

Then you have the simple list of attendees, which also only the owner can see before the webinar. There are just some simple (at least from a user perspective) features that seem to be lacking.

[#16]

That is understandable. And in no way will the full model of outlook be available right away. But from the user perspective for a webinar there seem to be a few features missing leading up to the moment of the webinar. And yes we can use a workaround and use a new shared usage licensed account, but that will cause other problems with MFA. Where there for example is only a maximum number of MFA options available per account.

[#17]

I'm not pretending that the suggestion is imperfect, but you can only work within the capabilities of the software... Lobby Microsoft for improvements in this area and they might listen. https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462-1c1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472

[#18]

True and I was hoping a bit someone had a suggestion I didn't think about yet. Thanks for the help though :)

[#19]

I am not seeing the co-organizer option despite having the Public Preview (Or Developer Preview) enabled on my Teams. Am I missing something?

[#20]

@Malorie Clark  We are not seeing it yet either and really need it.  I see the rollout timeframe has been set to Feb 22 - is there any better info available yet?