Forum Discussion
More options as Teams meeting organizer, e.g. mute all participants
Hey Harold,
The 'Mute All Participants' feature is coming this quarter.
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).
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 !! lolMigs
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.
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.- Actually I bet MS got feedback about Skype and didn’t keep it updates through continuous investment and instead bought a whole new company’s product to replace it and some of those features simply were not the same. That’s why teams is still playing catch-up; but the strength of the teams foundation/architecture has enabled them to make great strides quickly. They still have a ways to go but I see them becoming a webex competitor soon.
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.
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
