Meeting Roles: Using Meeting Options to Restrict Participant Actions

When creating a Teams meeting, the default is to let all invitees present and control the meeting. In some cases, this practice may not be desirable. This article shows how the organizer can set the meeting options to limit who can present and control the some meeting options.

A common misconception is that you need to create a team to use the online Teams Meeting feature. While it is possible to have an ad-hoc Teams Meeting inside a team channel, you can schedule a Teams Meeting without having a team.

By default, people with UWindsor accounts have the presenter role when they are invited to meetings. That gives them the ability to mute others, share their screen or apps, and remove others from the meeting. The meeting organizer can control access to participants by using meeting options. This can be done in the meeting invitation, or access changes can be done during the meeting by the organizer.

Meeting Options

From your Outlook Calendar

When creating a Teams meeting, the default is to let all invitees present and control the meeting. In some cases, this practice may not be desirable.  The organizer can set the meeting options from within the invitation by clicking in the meeting options link. The meeting options link can be found in the calendar entry and invitations for the meeting.  If you are using Outlook on a PC, you will be able to see the link while creating the entry. If you are using Outlook on the Web or on a Mac, you will need to save the calendar entry first, and then open it again from the calendar to find the Meeting Options link.

From your Teams Calendar

If you view the calendar entry in teams, the link is at top of the calendar item:

During the Meeting

You can also change the meeting options during a meeting. 

The Meeting Options page looks like the following. The organizer of the meeting (i.e. the person who scheduled the meeting and sent the invitation to others) is able to change these default options and participant roles before or during the meeting. 

Changes to "Who can present" option, which assigns roles to attendees, via the meeting options will only apply to new people joining the meeting. If you want to change roles of people who already joined the meeting, you need to set them one at at time via the three dots to the right of their name in the participants list.

Also, if you scheduled your meeting in a channel, then the option to disallow chat will not be available in meeting options. If you need to control this, then schedule the event as a regular non-channel Teams meeting  (it can be recurring). If it is for a course, you can get the meeting link and paste it into either a Teams channel chat.

Suggested Option Settings

The following table provides some suggestions on meeting options for different types of meetings:

Assigning Roles During a Meeting

The organizer can change these roles during the meeting. Open the participants list and select the three dots next to an attendee’s name. Select “Make an attendee” or “Make a presenter” as desired.

The Lobby

Any presenter can can admit waiting users into the meeting.

Options for people joining via telephone

When participants join the meeting via the call-in numbers, the meeting organizer has a couple of options that control how they join and exit the meeting. These options are available to the meeting organizer in meeting options.

If you let callers bypass the lobby -- they are immediately connected.  You can disable the announcement message when callers join or leave as well.

Meeting Attendance Report

The meeting organizer can download a spreadsheet that records when people joined and left the meeting.

This report can only be downloaded during the meeting. If you want this information, download the report before leaving the meeting by pressing the icon at the top of the people panel.  The people panel is accessed by pressing the icon in the meeting toolbar.

Guests

Guests are people who are outside of the University of Windsor. Guests can be presenters or attendees and behave similarly except that:

• Guest presenters cannot start or stop a recording
• Guest presenters cannot request control, or be given control, to shared content (windows or screens)
• Guest presenters and attendees cannot upload files to the meeting chat
• Guest presenters cannot invite new participants

Location of Recordings

When a meeting is recorded there are two possible locations where it is stored.

If a meeting is held in a Teams channel, it is stored in a folder called Recordings in the Files tab of that channel. All team members will be able to view and edit the recording.

If a meeting is ad-hoc, or a 1 on 1 meeting, it is stored in the OneDrive of the person who started the recording.  It will be in the Recordings folder in OneDrive, and it will be automatically shared with other meeting participants.

More information on changing recording permissions: Teams Meeting Recordings on SharePoint and OneDrive | The University of Edinburgh

Notes

For meetings that occur in a Teams channel, all members of the team have the presenter role.

The maximum number of people in a Teams meeting is 250.

If you need to create an event where attendees should not be able to participate via their camera or microphone, consider using a Live Event.

More Information

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/roles-in-a-teams-meeting-c16fa7d0-1666-4dde-8686-0a0bfe16e019