Apr 13 2020 02:45 PM
I am trying to figure out how to control potentially disruptive people joining a public council meeting.
What I’d like to achieve
Ideally, I’d like to make someone an observer – no chat, no talk. If I could make that automatic for those being held at the lobby that would be perfect.
The information in the product and documents around meeting policies and settings seems confused
The documentation says https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoftteams/meeting-policies-in-teams
Meeting policy settings - Participants & guests
These settings control which meeting participants wait in the lobby before they are admitted to the meeting and the level of participation they are allowed in a meeting.
With the allow chat option saying
This is a per-organizer policy. This setting controls whether meeting chat is allowed in the user's meeting.”
If it is a per-organizer setting according to this documentation it only applies to participants and guests.?
But in the product (admin.teams.mcirsoft.com) the same section of Meetings/Meeting policies the on-screen description says:
Participants & guests
Participant and guest settings let you control access to Teams meetings for people that dial in using a phone. Learn more
i.e. that these settings only apply to phone users?
Sound a bit unlikely – how (and why) would a phone user enable live captions?
But I am uncertain what disabling chat means here (and of course, with huge lag in policies it is very hard to experiment).
So, can I have chat on for authenticated participants and off for anonymous attendees?
I think Ideally what I’d like is a “silent” mode for attendees – so that they can’t turn on their microphone. i.e. a policy/setting that makes attendees into observers only.
Apr 13 2020 03:33 PM
Apr 13 2020 04:20 PM
Hi@Ian Cunningham , Ryan is correct. A Teams meeting is designed to be collaboration session with full participation from everyone. A Live Event would be what you are looking for, which would be more useful for distributing content to most users but allowing a select few to fully participate in the event.
Apr 13 2020 07:33 PM
Apr 14 2020 12:45 AM
Thanks - I didn;t think this was included in our licence
Lookign at the relevant page
Here are the licenses that must be assigned:
So I have been under the misapprehension that we would need to buy additional licences for live events (whereas re-reading it might just be a technical point that we have those licenses but they need to be assigned.)
But -rereading the feature compare list it does say Live Events in the list
(I also note that Stream is in there anyway - which it wasn't the first time I looked at the stream).
So thanks - I will experiment straightaway.
I am guessing that all the councillors at the meeting will need to be presenters - they can and must be allowed to speak at any time.