Sometimes the people that are in our meetings don’t know that they are not muted, accidentally requesting control, or attempting to take over the presentation. Let’s look at how we can control a number of different factors before the meeting even begins.
Managing Attendees
We are going to start by looking at meeting controls for your video and live sessions. Teams has added an option menu for meeting organizers to better manage attendees. If you are the meeting organizer, you just need to edit the meeting. You will see the Meeting options menu in the top menu bar.
Note: The options available to you may differ, depending on the policies and settings applied by your Administrator.
The first option is who can bypass the lobby, and the options provided are:
- Everyone - you don’t have to admit every person into your meeting;
- People in my organization and trusted organizations - anyone that your IT has placed in the trusted organization;
- People in my organization - only people in your company (no external users or guest users);
- Only me - you will be the only one in the meeting, and you will need to admit everyone to your meeting.
The next two options in place are for allowing all callers joining the call without hitting the lobby and announcing when they join and leave.
The "Always let callers bypass the lobby" option means people can get into the meeting immediately when dialing into the call via a phone number, and the "Announce when callers join or leave" option controls whether or not Teams will announce their arrival or departure from the meeting.
The final option is 'Who can present?', this option should be looked at if you have large meetings, or people from outside of your organization that will be attending. This will allow you to control who can present in the meeting and will not allow anyone that does not have permission to present.
The options they provide are:
- Only me
- Everyone
- People in my organization
- Specific people*
*For you to allow specific people, you will need to invite them as a presenter and not an attendee.
Muting Attendees
We can also mute people in the meeting in real time if necessary (since the option to auto-mute all attendees isn’t available, yet). When you are in the meeting if someone has forgotten to mute themselves, it is an amazingly easy solution. All you need to do is click on the participants button, and it will show all the presenters and attendees.
Finally, you will be able to click on the “…" beside the name of the person that you would like to mute and click on the mute button.
There you have it, a few ways that you can control your meeting options, and allow you to control the flow of your Teams meetings. This will allow you to make sure that all the information that you need to portray can be done so in the most clear, concise, and quickest way possible. Everyone can then get a few minutes back in their day.
If you ever have issues with Teams, how to manage your meetings, or anything else Teams related, Bloom Software is here to help.
