SOLVED

teams live event participants hitting core meeting lobby

Steel Contributor

Has anyone had an issue where Teams live event participants are hitting the core event meeting lobby instead of getting the attendee experience?  This has happened now in two of our events recently (think about the fun of 900 people connecting and getting the lobby admittance ding every 10 seconds) and we're stumped as to why. 

 

I tested to see if someone who isn't supposed to be a presenter accidentally gets the presenter link and confirms that, even with that link, they still connect to the attendee space, so having the link doesn't automatically admit you as a producer or presenter.

8 Replies
best response confirmed by David Phillips (Steel Contributor)
Solution

Hi @David Phillips ,

 

When scheduling the meeting, did you enable the "allow external presenters" option? If this is enabled, and the wrong link is used (meaning, you send out the internal event link, and not specifically the one for attendees) you can see this behavior. 

Yeah that seems to be it. That needs to be fixed, there's no control over that link once it's sent out, even though it says "DON'T FORWARD THIS!"

I have a case open with Premier, will let them know we figured out why it's happening.  Thank you for the response!

Hi @David Phillips,

 

Not sure what would be fixed per se... it's by design. The main invites already have a "do not forward" in the body as you noted (but yes, it's not enforced). Ideally though, the only time you would need that toggle is if you are allowing *anonymous* external presenters. If your external presenters already have Teams work accounts, this toggle isn't necessary. 

I was under the impression that external presenters meant anyone outside the org, including external Teams orgs. Will have to test this!

Also, the simple fix to a presenter link getting out into the wild (it's going to happen) would be to allow organizers to disable the popup / lobby sound. That can get pretty intrusive, not only during live events but regular Teams meetings as well.

Yeah, it's as I thought - When a user with a Teams account external to the organization is invited as a presenter and tries to join without external presenter turned on, they get the "This event is in xxxx. To join you'll need to be in that org too."

@David Phillips that should work - the message you see there might indicate that this user has a Guest account in that hosting org, so they need to switch tenants in the client before joining.

 

We absolutely support federated joins to Live Events without the toggle - I use it all the time with our large 1P events. (this of course assumes federation is not disabled)

Yep - there's definite guest connections there.

Thanks for all of the insight, very helpful.

@Bryan Nyce 

We have experienced this issue as well. One very helpful way to address some of the confusion over the presenter link vs the attendee link for Teams Live Events would be to programmatically change the label on the presenter link from the current "Join Live Event", which sounds like it is for everybody, to the more accurate/specific "Presenter Link".

 

I have also seen that MS Forms has added an integrated URL shortener.  Would be excellent if TLE scheduler could include that for attendee links and/or perhaps automatically alter the displayed text of the attendee link to show up as "Watch the (Live Event Title)"

 

We used to edit the body of live event notices (sent to organizers and presenters) to include attendee invite instructions and a shortened/formatted attendee link for admins/organizers to easily copy and paste into a separate attendee invite. Unfortunately a change made to the platform in November caused any event that included an additional link in the body to become corrupted upon editing the event in any way (add/remove presenters, add Q&A, etc.). That corruption showed up as the meeting reverting to what looks like a standard Teams meeting. The live event information is still in the body, but you loos all access to edit the live event or access event resources. We have had an open premier ticket on this matter going on 2 months [Case #:28371802].

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by David Phillips (Steel Contributor)
Solution

Hi @David Phillips ,

 

When scheduling the meeting, did you enable the "allow external presenters" option? If this is enabled, and the wrong link is used (meaning, you send out the internal event link, and not specifically the one for attendees) you can see this behavior. 

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