MS Teams: Meeting participants cannot view chat or click record

[MagrietdeV]

Our institutional Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference was held on MS Teams 9-10 November 2021. We created a conference Team and built the whole online conference by creating a channel for every session (plenaries, parallel sessions, etc). Attendees could a) access the sessions via the Teams channels directly or b) click on the PDF version of the programme, at the time of the channel sessions, and access the meeting in this way.

We experienced the following issues

1. Many people could not see the chat (even though they tried to re-enter the meeting, restarted Teams, etc.). This seemed to happen randomly.
2. The session facilitators were in many cases unable to click 'start recording'. This was also seemingly random.

Please note that all participants were enrolled in the Team beforehand (so theoretically had the correct rights to see the chat and click record) and 98% of them were bona fide institutional attendees who accessed the Team with their institutional credentials. The last session meeting of the conference was created in Outlook Calendar (i.e. not as a channel meeting) and everyone could see the chat.

Could anyone advise on what the possible cause may be? We did find that those who only entered the Teams meetings via the channels seemed to have fewer issues than those who accessed the meetings via the programme. This is, however, not definitive.

Many thanks for any advice!

[#2]

Hi @MagrietdeV 

So for your plenaries and parallel sessions you were using Channel Meetings. This is where the meeting chat is actually a conversation in the associated channel. Although you gave you users guest accounts, they were perhaps not using them before joining the meeting from your pdf. To access a channel meetings chat you need to be logged in as a users with access to the channel or switched as a guest to that team. I suspect many were joining using the accounts of other organisations, so didn't have permissions to access chat unfortunately.

When you organise through Outlook there is no channel, and anyone who joins can access the meeting chat. 

I've seen events force this to work by preventing people joining meetings as external attendees through Teams policies, so they have to load Teams and either log in or switch to your tenant before joining your meetings, but I'm not sure that's a brilliant users experience.