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.

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