If you have had a Teams meeting today, you may have noticed that you can now do changes who can present in Teams meetings!
I tested these in a scheduled meeting, meet now and in a channel meeting. All meetings work in the same way -> whoever is scheduling or starting the meeting is the Organizer. Organizer is a special role presenter that cannot be changed during the meeting nor anyone else can take it away. They are always in charge and can change who is a presenter or attendee.
Presenters can do all that we have done in Teams meetings: they can share content, admit people in from a lobby, manage recording, mute or remove people from meetings. Presenters can mute the organizer, but there is no “remove participant” available. Organizer is the one who decides when it is a good moment to leave.
Attendees can enjoy the show, turn video on/off, mute or unmute themselves and use the Pin-option to choose the content they want to view the most. What is good is that attendees cannot anymore take over the sharing and facilitation of the meetings is left to presenters.
The Attendee
Attendees have some options that are not available for them:
When looking at the meeting bar the share control is disabled. Also if you open the … menu you can see the recording is disabled but you can turn off incoming videos.
Attendees cannot mute others – they can only pin them.
The Presenter
They have more control. They can control the attendees as before – with the exception that there is the new function to promote a attendee to presenter or make a presenter to attendee.
However, the exception is the organizer. If organizer wouldn’t have been muted already there would be a option to mute him. However you cannot demote a organizer to attendee nor you can remove him from the meeting.
Since I was testing this on a single computer I turned off my audios for most of the time. Organizer can choose to mute himself – but I don’t think that was never the question.
The Organizer
Organizers can do all that presenters do. However, they can also do some changes when they are scheduling the meeting using meeting options.
Clicking Meeting options takes you to a web page (make sure your browser is authenticated to the same domain or you get a fail!) where the possibly familiar dialog has gotten a extra funtion:
From the “Who can present” dropdown you can preselect who are joining as attendees or who are organizers:
When you are done, click save and you are done.
I am still waiting for one more option to this one: attendees join muted. It would also be good that presenters could control if attendees can unmute themselves: a kind of master switch during the meeting (say, a townhall or announcement) and then allowing the unmute for Q&A section.
Vesa Nopanen - My Metaverse Day 
Hey,
There is not option to change the default behavior to only let people in your organization be presenters?
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Hi! I haven’t found any way to set default options so far. So you need to do this for each meeting that require more control. How often you have large meetings that would benefit from this? Many times a day? Daily? Weekly?
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Can you have more than one organizer? If I’m the organizer can I add for example my colleague as an organizer too?
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Unfortunately there can be only one organizer currently. So you can’t add a second organizer. You can only control if others are presenters or attendees.
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Make me presenter
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please i am from vibgyor school can you make me organizer?
pleas?
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Teams meeting organizer is the one person who creates the meeting. In the roadmap (autumn 2021) there is a item that will enable for the meeting organizer to add others to that role.
So to become an organizer in a meeting you need to be the one who schedules & creates it for now.
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Is it possible to change a presenter into attendee ??
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Yes, you can demote presenters to attendees.
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Can I change the organizer once the meeting has been scheduled?
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No you can not, unfortunately.
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Here’s a scenario that would definitely help in my line of work (recruitment) or maybe there is such an option already. Is there a possibility for me to organize a meeting and not participate in it? We organize tons of meetings for our client (outside company) and their candidates and it would be amazing if we could organize videoconference interviews for them directly instead of asking them to deliver the link and we cannot participate in those as a third party…
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You don’t have to participate in the meeting even if you schedule it. In your scenario it would be good to create the meeting using your client tenant’s identity (perhaps you could have an account in there) since only a member of the hosting organization can start the recording (if that is needed). If you create the meeting (& the link to it) you can of course attend it but that can be managed with contracts that you don’t.
Another, a bit of work/development requiring, is to create an app that does the meeting scheduling instead of a person.
The most simple way would be to have an account to each client’s tenant that would allow you to organize a meeting in that tenant directly and invite all those parties in. That way your home tenant accounts are not included in the process.
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Thanks a lot for the quick reply! Makes sense, hopefully will manage to get that sorted like that somehow…
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As you said, Even if i schedule a meeting, i dont have to participate it ,right? But i would be the organisor when i schedule it. so when presenters and other atendees join the meeting, who will allow them to join? i think only organisor is in charge for that. I am also a person who would like to schedule meetings for my boss without me joining. So I wonder if it works out that I just scchedulen it and wont join that. Thank you in advance.
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Presenters can allow people into the meeting.
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I am doing POC with Microsoft Teams. I created users under my azure AD. I created meeting on behalf of user by calling onlineMeetings API in my code and getting the response. I am getting only join url not start url. I need to start the Teams meeting from the flutter app (without asking the user to enter the credentials). How can I start teams meeting using user access token. Please help.
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Perhaps these articles could help with calls?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/application-post-calls?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http#example-5-join-scheduled-meeting-with-service-hosted-media
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/cloud-communications-online-meetings
I am sorry but I haven’t tested that kind of scenario so I don’t have a good answer to that.
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IS there a way to remove someone from a re-occurring meeting so they cannot view existing and new chat, files etc that are part of the series of meetings?
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Unfortunately no to regular meetings. However, if you do that meeting as a Channel meeting then the content (chat,files etc) visibility is connected to team membership. Once you remove that person from that team the access to chat and files is lost.
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Hi Vesa, I have organised a MT Meeting however will not be in attendance. The meeting needs recording by my step-in. how do we achieve this please?
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Anyone from your organization (they have account in your tenant) with presenter permissions can start the recording. So if you can’t attend the meeting then you need to find someone else from your organization to press the start recording button.
Remember that you can also start the recording using your mobile Teams as well. If you join the meeting when you are signed into your organization tenant you can easily start the recording via Mobile Teams and then leave to attend other matters. You don’t have to say in the meeting for recording to work. The recording will stop automatically once everyone has left the meeting.
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Brilliant! Thank you Vesa.
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How can we have a team meeting each day where different people in the meeting can take attendance since we have to take turns even though we have only one organizer that can download a list? Seems only Organizers can download the list. Are other type of participants able to download the list of attendees?
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Only meeting organizers (the person who created the meeting) can download the attendees list. Currently the organizer have to do it during the meeting but attendee report improvements are in the (near) roadmap. It should allow download of the report after the meeting as well (no info can others but organizer do the download).
They seem to improving this feature a piece by piece.
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Someone asked if it is possible to change organizers after the meeting has started, but can you change organizers at any other time after a meeting has ended?
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Unfortunately it can not be currently done. Meeting organizer is the only who created the meeting.
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Hi! Can I organise a meeting and then not join it? I’m a PA, so I organise tons of meetings for my boss, but I don’t need to be present on them. But my boss and other participants should be able to start the meeting and have it, without me present. Is it possible? there is no need to record the meeting, just start it.
I organise a meeting from my calendar and then send it out to other participants. And they need to be able to start and have it without me. Is it possible?
There was one today and I got a call from the participants that they all are waiting in the “lobby” and can’t start a meeting without me. Meaning without me starting it from my computer/mobile phone.
How can this situation be avoided?
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It is possible to start meetings without you having to be there to approve people in.
There are two places that define lobby settings: one is Teams Admin Center where the organization Admin defines settings for starting the meeting and lobby controls at the high level.
Depending on those high-level settings a meeting organizer (you in this case) can send out the invitation and then open Meeting Options-section in the Teams meeting you just sent out and select Lobby settings so that everyone can get in and they don’t have to wait in a Lobby. If that option is not available (no lobby) then you need to talk with your Admin to change settings at Teams Admin Center.
There are also Admin center settings like “can anonymous start a meeting” that should be checked by your Teams/IT Admin that guests can start a meeting without waiting in a lobby.
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Sir, How can I share my camera only with the organizer and not with the attendees ?
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Unfortunately it is not possible. In the meeting when you open the camera everyone in the meeting can see it.
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I scheduled a meeting on teams and one of participant get in just before the meeting and he became the organizer, how is that happened, and how I can prevent this to happen again?
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The one who schedules the meeting is always the organizer. Others can be presenters or attendees.
To control who gets in early you need to check the Meeting Options and set up lobby. You can choose the lobby setting so that only you are allowed to enter without a lobby and everyone else must wait there until you let them in.
In the meeting options you can also set who can be a presenter on default so you can choose everyone attending to be a attendee only.
Check out from Microsoft Support site how you can set Meeting Options: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-dbd5-45f9-aae9-a70e6354f88e?WT.mc_id=M365-MVP-5003326
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I have had the same issue. I am the organizer. A student joins before me and automatically it makes them the organizer. I lose all control. I even had a lobby set up.
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That does sound really weird. I suggest you contact your IT Admin and ask them to do a Service Request to Microsoft via Admin portal. That way Microsoft can look into it. First to join should become the organizer – it is reserved to the person/account who created the meeting.
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There is a reoccurring meeting that happens every week for a specific team but the user who was the organizer is no longer with the company. Is there a way to login into the users teams account and change the organizer to someone else and make it permanent?
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The best way would be to cancel the meeting and create a new one.
If the account hasn’t been fully deleted (only disabled) then IT-Admins can re-activate it and change the password and login as that person in to make changes. This procedure is considered highly illegal in several countries so a correct legal procedure must be cleared & followed first.
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I want everyone to be a presenter, no more attendees!!!
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Use meeting options before the meeting begins to select who can present: everyone
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Hi. I hope all is well with you?. Now they have launched the new breakout feature. I see its only when you are the meeting organiser that it appears. As we have a admin team setting up our online training events. I wondered if there was a way, they can assign organiser status to someone else. This would stop the training team (Us) from having to create and manage attendees for all the meetings. Inviting the delegates needs to be done by the admin team. Regards
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Hi Phil! Breakout Rooms are only available to the meeting organizers at this moment and you can not change or switch that role to someone else. They have plans to add more people who can manage Breakout Rooms but unfortunately there isn’t any schedule for those changes yet.
You might want to consider using a shared account for organizing those meeting – thus any of you could be logging in using that account and manage meetings. Until meeting organizer/Breakout Room managers part evolves at least.
I blogged yesterday about Breakout Rooms, you might want to take a look: https://myteamsday.com/2020/12/09/teams-breakout-rooms/
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How to control students not to turn into organisers? Please suggest
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Only the one who creates the meeting is the organizer. Use meeting options to set both lobby (allow only the organizer to join without lobby: only me ) and presenter (only me). Propably your organization’s defaults allow everyone to be a presenter.
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Thanks for the clarification.
I hope this gets updated soon.
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Hi!
Is planned that any meeting would have more than one organiser?
Otherwise, there is any option to make other participant manage the breakout rooms?
Thanks
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Multiple Breakout Rooms managers (additional people managing rooms) was shown at Microsoft Ignite 2020 demos so it should be under works. Hopefully adding more organizers to a meeting would also be available with that – but we will know when we see.
Multiple organizers in a meeting is a asked feature and much needed one as well.
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How do I remove myself as an organizer
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You can not change organizer role in the meeting. Who creates the meeting is always the organizer. So the only way to change the organizer is to recreate the meeting by the right organizer.
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unfortunately, one of the attendee has become organizer.Please help me how to switch back the organizer.
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The one who creates the meeting is the organizer and it can not be changed. If your attendee has become a presenter you can demote them back to attendee. You should check out meeting options after you create the meeting to set who will be presenters and who attendees on demand: that helps to prevent situations where everyone ends up as presenters.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/roles-in-a-teams-meeting-c16fa7d0-1666-4dde-8686-0a0bfe16e019
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-dbd5-45f9-aae9-a70e6354f88e
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I need to have a co-presenter that can create and set breakout rooms, co-present as we switch back and forth as hosts. How can we set this up. We train monthly and I need this to be available.
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Extending management of Breakout Rooms to other presenters is scheduled for June 2021.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=1&filters=Microsoft%20Teams%2CWhiteboard%2CIn%20development%2CRolling%20out&searchterms=breakout%2Crooms
However to be able to present in rooms you don’t have to have management extended. With right meeting options and policies you can be a presenter when you join a room. Extended management is needed to be able can move between rooms without organizer’s help – or move others between rooms for example.
Currently I suggest you can one appointed organizer who helps presenters to move between rooms and makes sure everything goes smoothly. A mind of moderator/producer role in that sense. Or you have that “role” running in one Teams Desktop while you attend the meeting using a web Teams (unless you have two devices at hand). It is a workaround at the moment but it should get easier once they release the extend management to other presenters.
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I recorded a 7 hour Teams session and it only recorded 2 hours and 57 min. The next day I recorded another 7 hour session and it only recorded 15 minutes. I am perplexed. Is there a limit? I train a 3-day class once an month and need to record theses sessions.
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One limit per meeting recording is 4 hours but Teams will automatically stop and start recording if the meeting is still on.
Your case sounds to me as a glitch if you (or someone else from your organization) didn’t stop the recording manually.
If you are certain Teams showed it was recording all the time I suggest you do the following:
– get those meeting join URLs
– ask your admin (or check yourself) those find those meetings from your Meetings & call history in Teams Admin Center (users – you account – Meeting & call tab) and get their Meeting IDs.
– Ask your admin (or yourself if you have permissions) to open a ticket with Microsoft Support and provide those information along with description what happened. Support might be able to help you retrieve those recordings but I think there is a time limit on this one that is not a long one.
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