Restrict access to MS Teams meeting outside of specified meeting times

Copper Contributor

My colleagues and I have recently delivered a series of 25 training sessions to approximately 100 new starters (some of whom were using internal credentials, others still external credentials), and for each session, I set up an individual meeting invite. Each invite was set up to:

  • allow everyone to bypass the lobby,
  • not announce when people join or leave,
  • automatically record,
  • permit anyone to present/turn on webcam,
  • enable the meeting chat
  • allow reactions

We found that the attendees regularly joined the meeting well over an hour before the meetings were scheduled to start and then failed to leave once the meeting had ended, sometimes remaining on the call for several hours. We were recording all of the sessions and this was set to automatically begin when someone with an internal email address began the meeting but didn't stop unless someone manually stopped the recording or the meeting was ended. I therefore had to edit each of the recordings which contained actual training, and sift through the rest to delete any which had been created by someone joining the meeting and then leaving as it hadn't actually begun/had already finished. Additionally, we needed to generate attendance records, but neither these nor the recording would always be available if an attendee was still on the call.
Because of the number of people involved in delivering the training, as well as attending it, we decided that the Lobby function was not feasible as the repeated notifications are incredibly distracting.

We used to use WebEx and having also used Zoom personally, I feel what is lacking with Teams is the ability to restrict when attendees can join a call as you can with the other platforms. It would also be useful to restrict who can start/restart a meeting, to avoid multiple recordings/attendance records. As, although you can delete them from the meeting's files, you can't prevent them from appearing in the meeting chat, which is confusing for attendees.

 

What we'd like to see is:

- The ability to restrict the joining time in advance of a scheduled meeting

- The ability to limit who can start/restart a meeting

- The removal of duplicate attendance records/recordings from the meeting chat once they have been deleted from the meeting files

1 Reply

@HCusworth Hello! I understand that the sessions were confusing and perhaps even odd things happened. You did use and configure the meeting options which is good (and necessary) but I wouldn't want everybody being a Presenter. That role has almost all capabilities as the Organizer role and will definitely confuse and create issues. So you should specify only one or two Presenters so the rest will be Attendees with limited meeting feature permissions.

 

See this article for a structured table about the roles Roles in a Teams meeting (microsoft.com)

For the meeting participant settings Change participant settings for a Teams meeting (microsoft.com)

 

"The ability to restrict the joining time in advance of a scheduled meeting"

- As noted not available, at least not when letting everybody to bypass the lobby.

 

"The ability to limit who can start/restart a meeting"

- This is controlled with the meeting roles. An Attendee cannot start or stop a recording for ex.

 

"The removal of duplicate attendance records/recordings from the meeting chat once they have been deleted from the meeting files"

- Won't happen with configured meeting roles.

 

The organizer can always end the meeting for all, have a look at that. Soon the Co-organizer support role will be added to Teams (February) so a Co-org. can do that as well. On top of some other things.

 

Co-organizer Meeting Role

 

Hope that helps.