Firstly I have to confess that the options that I am going to describe here are not in any way hidden by the normal definition of the word.
However, I was recently taking part in a Teams meeting where almost all the attendees were external to the organisation and the meeting organiser began to get frustrated at all the “Person A is in the Lobby” messages, particularly as some people joined, dropped and then rejoined. After the meeting, I spoke to the organiser and asked if they knew they could simply set the meeting to allow people to join if they have the appropriate link and it turned out they didn’t.
This got me thinking about how people interact with Teams and whether the per-meeting options are obvious to users. If someone is heavily embedded into the M365 ecosystem then chances are that most (if not all) will create meetings via Outlook and determine whether they are face-to-face or Teams-based at that point. That being the case the Teams options are not surfaced directly and the standard settings for the tenancy will be applied.
The standard settings can be set by the administrator for the tenancy (or the Teams admin if those aren’t the same people) but I’d hazard a guess that a large majority of Teams users will be getting the out-of-the-box Microsoft defaults.
How the meeting is created also alters how the settings are accessed (or at least that is the case when using the new Teams client on a Mac and I think it is the same for Windows) which means that although once created the meetings appear in the Teams to be the same they aren’t.
If you have created a Teams meeting in Outlook, then to access the settings go to the Teams client, select the Calendar and then edit the meeting either by double-clicking it or by single-clicking and selecting the Edit option.
Once the meeting has opened across the top will be a line of options where you can set various calendar options such as Free/Busy, category etc and to the far right of these is the meeting options button.
To the far right is the button for changing the options.
If you create a meeting in Teams the options button is presented there are then.
Once again to the right of the bar is the Options button.
How the options are presented visually also changes depending on how and when you access them and for clarity, the screenshots below are from an Outlook-created meeting but the actual options are the same however they are presented.
One of the challenges with writing about Teams is that the user interface changes frequently and in writing this piece using the same device and the same version of Teams I experienced differences. But that’s another story!
Due to the number of options available we’ll break them down into two parts.
The first option is the one that kick-started this whole thought process. The ability to control the lobby. Before we look at the options it may be worth remembering why there is a lobby in the first place. Back in the lockdown days, there were lots of tales of meetings, and online lessons particularly, being rudely interrupted by random people who had either managed to get hold of the link to the session or on some platforms simply guessed the link format and tried until they barged into one. To prevent this, lobbies were added to deny people access until the meeting organiser let them in.
So, by default, most organisations will not enforce a lobby for users within the organisation but will drop external users into the lobby until admitted. There are several options for the lobby.
These are largely self-explanatory. The Everybody option provides the least friction but also opens the session up to the largest possibility of abuse as anybody could come straight into the meeting and unless the organiser is paying a lot of attention to the list of attendees they are likely to miss them.
If you do have a particular issue with too many external users going into the lobby it is worth experimenting with the options, in theory, the invited option should solve the problem but as noted above, the variation in Teams clients and users does mean that this doesn’t always work as expected.
One interesting question is why would you want to select an option that puts more people, including internal users, into a lobby. Well, we can look at some of these later but consider a simple situation where you were holding job interviews over Teams with both internal and external applicants. You would in those circumstances want everyone to have the same experience and the panel may well want an opportunity to discuss applicants before starting the meeting so preventing access makes sense.
The next two options relate to how users who are not using Teams but are dialling in will be treated. This only becomes relevant if the tenancy has an additional conferencing add-on that facilitates this but if that feature is active it can be useful to announce when callers join or leave so that other participants are aware.
The next option allows for co-organisers to be added to the meeting. This can then be combined with other settings to restrict functionality, lobby access and presentation for example, to a specific group of attendees. One simple example would be if a presentation was being undertaken by several members of a team then all could be set as co-organisers and they could be the only people allowed to present.
Which leads to the next option. By default, anyone in a meeting can present either their screen(s) or specific applications such as PowerPoint. Although this can be handled purely as a point of etiquette this option allows the meeting organiser to mandate who is and is not allowed to present.
As you can see this can be set to quite a granular level with specific named users being allowed.
The next two options control the microphone and camera access for attendees. By default, each attendee can control their own microphone and camera and I’m sure we’ve all been in meetings where some loud background noise keeps coming over someone who has forgotten to mute their mic. With these settings, you can control this centrally. For example, if you are presenting to a large group you may not want the camera feeds from all the attendees taking up screen space. We’ll look at his a bit later on for other uses.
The option to record meetings is present (depending on tenancy settings) for all meetings. This option allows this to be selected from the start. The reason to enforce this setting would be for meetings where key information was being shared but not all staff would be able to attend live and so a recording would be shared for anyone unable to be present. Setting it at the meeting level means that the presenter(s) don’t have to remember to set it when they start the meeting.
The next option controls the meeting chat function.
The On and Off settings are pretty obvious. By default though, chat for a meeting will be available to attendees before and after the meeting. This can be useful as it allows people to say they are running late for example or allow for a dump of information and links after the meeting has closed. However, it can also be easy to lose track if people keep adding to the chat and in some cases it may not be desirable to have people continue a conversation that not all attendees may see. So an option to restrict chat to the meeting being active is actually quite helpful.
Now onto the second half of the options.
Q&A offers a richer experience than the standard chat. With standard chat, anyone can ask a question and others can answer. This can be fine for many purposes but as the number of attendees increases it can run the risk of multiple people asking the same question or someone answering a question with incorrect information or indeed people going into a back and forth taking away from the original intent.
The Q&A feature allows the meeting organiser to have a much greater level of control over questions and presents several useful options. Once turned on, the meeting will gain an extra tab to manage the Q&A settings.
By default, attendees are allowed to ask questions and post replies which can be helpful in some cases. However, it may be that the meeting organisers want any answers to come from them so replies can be turned off.
As standard the questions will be shown with the attendee’s name, however, there are some circumstances where people may not feel comfortable with asking questions in this way so the option to allow for anonymous posts is there. If using this feature it may be worth reflecting to the attendees the point that replies and reactions will still contain the user’s name even when they are in response to an anonymous post. This can confuse and lead to people thinking that the question was not truly anonymous.
The final option deals with how questions appear in the Q&A timeline. If left un-moderated the questions (and replies if turned on) will appear exactly as they would in chat in a first-come first-served manner. This does of course lead to the same potential problem of multiple people asking the same question, or versions of a question even.
To avoid this, moderation can be applied, dropping all questions into a holding space that only the meeting organisers can access. They can then choose which order to respond, group similar questions together with an answer that covers more than one question or choose to respond to a question offline if it is more appropriate to do so (for example if someone asks a question that would require sensitive or personal information to answer fully).
Organisers can also choose to update answers and also to pin selected answers to the top of the Q&A space so if one question is being asked by a lot of people that could be pinned to ensure that it remains visible as more questions are answered.
The next option refers to reactions and in this context, it is specifically looking at the live reactions that can be inserted into the meeting using the React button (as opposed to reactions inserted into chat or Q&A). These reactions are quite big and with a large number of attendees could easily become very distracting so whether to leave these available will be determined depending on the meeting.
Over time, Teams has improved the ability to provide transcription of a meeting automatically using increasingly advanced technology including AI. However, there is still a (very specialist) option to allow a human transcriber to interface directly with the meeting and insert the captions as the speakers present.
We looked earlier at the ability to give a meeting co-organisers or to select only specific people as presenters. The Green Room option creates a room that only these users can access and this is available ahead of the meeting meaning that they can log on and prepare for example to check their video and sound settings are working or to queue up their presentations.
The green room also has private chat and is in effect like a separate meeting space with most of the usual Teams meeting functionality. While in the space the other attendees are put in the lobby irrespective of whether they would ordinarily bypass it. For example, if a meeting is created for a staff briefing and given a green room then internal users who are not organisers or presenters will drop into a lobby even if the default setting is for internal users to bypass.
This function also means that only those in the green room can start the meeting. Until that point, other attendees will be in the lobby with a message to inform them that the meeting will start soon. Once the meeting starts the video and audio for the green room members will swap to the meeting but the private chat will remain for the duration of the meeting.
Language interpretation is similar to the CART setting in that it allows a specific user to be allocated as a translator to perform real-time translation into other languages.
By default, at the end of a meeting, an attendance report will be generated to show who was present during the meeting. This can be useful because it shows not who was invited or who replied to the invite but who actually joined the meeting which allows the organiser to make sure that anyone who wasn’t able to attend can be contacted with further information if appropriate.
The final option relates to Copilot which is the Microsoft AI integration tool. At present the option is to either allow Copilot to view transcription data or not. By default, it is turned on which means that for internal meetings (that is meetings hosted on your company tenancy), if the option to record or transcribe is used then a Recap tab will appear after the meeting which Copilot will present a summary of the meeting. This could be useful but there are circumstances where this is not appropriate. It is particularly important to understand that once Copilot has access to data it will use that data to improve its responses to future queries. The challenges of information security and classification when using Copilot goes way beyond the scope of this article though!
Hopefully, this brief overview of the per-meeting settings give you some ideas for how you might tweak your meetings to get the most out of them. For standard meetings, the default options are probably going to be OK but the ability to add further controls over who can and cannot present, speak or display video or to weaken controls in terms of lobby access can be very helpful.
Of course, these are not the only settings for Teams meetings and you would not necessarily want to have to change them repeatedly if you, for example, had a lot of a particular type of meeting. To help with this Microsoft has created the ability to generate templates for various meeting types. Out of the box there are four standard templates.
To access these you need to create the meeting through the Teams client (which as we discussed earlier is not always the standard workflow).
The drop-down arrow to the right of the New Meeting button gives access to the templates.
As you can see, these represent some fairly common use cases and go beyond purely settings for the meeting, introducing things such as registration features. We will look more at these templates in future posts.
As always, if you have any questions or if you think we can be of help, please drop us a line via the contact form below.
