10/06/2020
Status: In Development
Launch date: Phased release through October 2020
New Meeting Management Options in Teams!
As more users take advantage of using Microsoft Teams to host their meetings, Microsoft continues to improve the meetings experience by providing additional functionality to support user needs. This set of changes provides support prior to joining, during, and ending meetings for users and organizers. Some of these features are enabled in your Teams Admin Center. Contact your IT/MIS Department for assistance if you don’t have access
What new features will be available?
Organizer Only lobby by-pass setting (Roadmap ID 66463).
A new option is being added to the Automatically admit people setting in the Teams Admin Center which will allow an organizer to start a meeting while all other meeting participants wait in the lobby. Prior to this change, the setting options for who could join the meeting when started were Everyone (no restrictions), Everyone in your organization, or Everyone in your organization and federated organizations. The newest option is Organizer only (as shown in the screen capture below). When this meeting policy is selected and saved, all newly scheduled Teams meetings will adopt the change.
To enable the policy, from the Teams Admin Center, select Meetings > Meeting policies > Global (Org-wide default).
Then scroll the screen to the Participants & guests section to modify the setting.
Rollout of this feature is expected by end of September, 2020.
New pre-join experience (Roadmap ID 67089).
While users are waiting to be admitted into a meeting, they can check the settings for their microphone, speakers, devices, and can optionally set a background filter that displays behind them when the meeting starts. You can also do that one last “check in the mirror” before the meeting starts!
Preventing attendees from unmuting (Roadmap ID 66575).
Organizers can now control when an attendee is permitted to speak in a meeting. Prior to joining the meeting, an organizer is presented with a new meeting option titled Allow attendees to unmute. Switching this option to “off”, will require an attendee to raise their hand when they want to speak in the meeting, which prompts the organizer or presenter to select an Allow to unmute option for that attendee.
Rollout of this feature is expected during the month of October, 2020
End of meeting notification (Roadmap ID 67122).
Meeting participants will be notified in the meeting banner when the scheduled meeting time has five (5) minutes remaining until the end of the meeting. The notification will be visible for ten (10) seconds and clears without user interaction.
Rollout of this feature is expected during September, 2020.
NOTE: There is no indication in the documentation whether the meeting will be forced to end or if the notification will display again if the end of meeting passes. Oh, the suspense!
How are these updates useful?
We’ve been reading horror stories from educators who have had students share meeting links, talk when they aren’t supposed to, and have had unwanted background visitors make an appearance. Sometimes, adult meeting participants forget the lessons they should have learned as children and exhibit the same behaviors. With so many organizations taking advantage of virtual meetings, these new features give organizers and presenters control when things can easily get out of control. And how many of you have attended meetings that go over because the presenter is not looking at that little teeny clock in the bottom corner of your screen? Yep, we see your hands.
Learn More
Click the Roadmap link for each new feature to read more information about these features.
Read more about custom backgrounds in this Microsoft 365 Blog by Jared Spataro: Custom backgrounds in Microsoft Teams make video meetings more fun...
Read more about Roles in this support article: Roles in a Teams meeting
