Changes to Default Meeting Lobby Behaviour in Teams

When you start a Teams meeting, you may be used to the fact that users from outside of your company wait in a virtual 'lobby', and need to be manually 'admitted' by someone before they join the meeting.

It used to be the case that this behaviour could not be changed (so external users would always wait in the lobby) but the meeting organiser can now change this. However, Microsoft have advised that shortly (from the end of August 2019), they will be changing the default behaviour so that external users will not wait in the lobby.

If your organisation is familiar with the lobby behaviour and expects this, you may need to take action now to make sure that this continues to be the case.

What do I need to do?

If you have created your own custom Teams meeting policies and all your users have one of these policies, then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you have not customised your policies, your Teams Meeting policy admin page might look like this, and you will need to make some simple changes.


Double-click on the Global (Org-wide default) policy (if that is what is assigned to all of your users), scroll down to the bottom, and change the 'Automatically admit people' option. 


Alternatively of course, you could just let your users know of the new behaviour!

Does it matter?

This is very much a personal (or organisational) preference. But some history is useful to think of the context.

In the old days (for those old enough to remember, the days of Lync....) the lobby behaviour was potentially quite important because each meeting had the same meeting ID. So if you had a meeting at 2pm for an hour, and the next meeting at 3pm, they use the same ID: so someone joining the 3pm meeting a few minutes early (or more likely, the 2pm meeting runs over...) would end up joining while the 2pm meeting was going on. Imagine the embarrassment if your client joins the end of the internal 'prep' call where you're all talking about how to deal with him... In such a case, it was obviously better if you could make sure you were aware when external users were about to join.

Now however, Teams uses a unique ID for each meeting: so anyone joining the 3pm meeting is just in that meeting, and can't accidentally gatecrash the 2pm one. For a long time (using Skype for Business), my preference has been for external users to not wait in the lobby: it makes the start of the meeting much quicker, but also, if they drop off accidentally during the call, they could sit and wait in the lobby again for some minutes when rejoining if no-one spotted the prompt.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Microsoft Whiteboard and Teams

Image
If you've tried to use the preview Whiteboard in Teams , you might have been a bit frustrated by its limitations. Currently, you can 'ink' - but that's about it. If your handwriting (with a mouse, anyway....) is as bad as mine, that's not great if you want to put text on your whiteboard. There also doesn't appear to be a way, from Teams, to export your creation. But there is a (relatively) easy workaround to get more functionality, it is actually documented in the Microsoft article Use Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams . Step 1 - install the Windows 10 Microsoft Whiteboard app from the Microsoft Store. Step 2 - Once it's installed, run the Whiteboard app and sign in with your Office 365 credentials, then close Whiteboard. Step 3 - Start your Teams meeting, click on the Share button and share a whiteboard (sometimes that menu item isn't immediately visible - scroll to the far right). Step 4 - Open the Windows 10 Whiteboard app, and you'll ...
Read more

Skype to Teams - which route?

Image
If you're currently using Skype for Business in your organisation, you have almost certainly started to think about how you might start to implement Microsoft Teams, and indeed, eventually, migrate fully to Teams. The question is, what's the best approach? Inevitably, there is no one answer, as every organisation is different. Microsoft's own guidance is here , and continues to evolve as they work with more and more organisations. Having worked with a customer on this topic recently, I've tried to put down some of the pros and cons of each approach. Straight-to-Teams This is my own name for this approach, and it's not covered in the Microsoft guidance, but I've included it for completeness. Pro No messing about with coexistence - users go straight from Skype for Business one day, to using Teams the next. Cons Large change brings the potential for technical risks. Users have to get used to a lot of change all at once. Realistically, you'...
Read more

Microsoft Licensing for Small Businesses

Image
The other week, I was looking into using Teams as a phone system for a potential small business customer - and spotted a major problem. But it's not a technical one, it's a licensing (or commercial) one: if you're licensed with one of the Small Business Plans (for less than 300 users), you cannot add a Phone System licence. To be able to add a Phone System licence, you need to have at least an 'E3' licence, which really surprised me. I spent a little while trying to tabulate the relevant features of a number of different licence plans, and produced this table to help try to compare and understand the options. Some points: I've not listed every single product and feature, just what I thought the ones which would be most relevant to a small business customer. I've translated the 'features' into actual 'products' to make it easier for techies to understand. All pricing is standard, with no discounts applied, as of July 2019 in GBP...
Read more