Microsoft Teams Lobby order

[Eduardohss]

We use Teams to answer our students' questions, but we use the lobby to keep them waiting until they are answered individually. For this we would like to know the order of entry of each participant in the meeting.

Example: If Brian enters the meeting first, he will be waiting in the lobby, then if Adele enters the meeting, she will also be waiting in the lobby, but when looking at the waiting list Adele is in first even though she joined after Brian. Would it be possible to keep the lobby list in order of entry rather than alphabetical order?

[#2]

Hi @Eduardohss ,

from my experience there is no way to get an information about the order of how your students entered the lobby.

But I would like to offer you another idea, but of course don't know if it will work in your scenario:

When you create the meeting for your students, set the meeting options to disable the attendee's microphone. When the students join the meeting, they are not able to activate their mic.

When the Q&A part begins, students can use the "raise your hand"- feature if they have a question.

And for some time now, the order of the raised hands has been displayed in the Teams client for the presenter. Then you activate the mic for each student in the correct order.

[#3]

Hi @Thorsten Pickhan!

Thanks for answering! Your suggestion is a good one, but if everyone is at the meeting, one student will be able to hear the other, right? That wouldn't be very good. We would like to keep them in the lobby precisely to maintain confidentiality between students while asking the teacher questions. I commented on this feature because we came from a competing app and it did this. We are missing this feature in Teams.

[#4]

Hi @Eduardohss ,

so, you provide an "open office hour"-meeting and students can join if they have questions. But this conversation should be a private 1-on-1 call between teacher and student. Is my understanding correct?

Are you using Exchange Online? If so, you can look at bookings or bookings personal. Your teachers could configure a schedule and offer 15 min time slots for a specifique time range in the week. Bookings will generate a website for it and students can pick and book a time slot. The booking itself is a Microsoft Teams meeting between the teacher and the student.

I don't know if it fit to your needs or if it is to static.

I'm not sure if the attendance report helps in case of a lobby and provides the required real time data when a user joined the lobby.

Breakout rooms could be an option when you work with "raise hand": create several break out rooms and assign the students accordingly.

But yeah, just workarounds and ideas. Not sure how it will work in a live scenario.

Did you already request this feature under https://aka.ms/TeamsFeedback ?

[#5]

Hi @Thorsten Pickhan!

Happy New Year!

Your understanding is correct. We use a common meeting for personal service and the lobby is used for that. In fact, we did the service this way in the competing application, today in Teams this is not possible to do. I can't know the arrival order of each one in the Lobby, so I have to randomly release them. In this way, it may end up releasing a person who has just entered, and there was another who entered much longer ago and is still waiting. We're testing "Bookings", it's a good alternative, but it's still not as practical as being able to release the entry of everyone in the Lobby. The meeting attendance report is also not practical, as I will have to extract reports from time to time and it will take a lot of time for the teacher. Actually having a view of the entry order in the lobby would be the shortest way to this process.