A heads-up at how the upcoming update will make your meetings more secure and productive

It is time to look at something coming to Microsoft Teams soon. I and millions – hundreds of millions – others have been enjoying Teams meeting since it was introduced, and we saw the explosive growth of Teams during COVID-years. Teams has evolved every year at a rapid pace, but one aspect has not seen this change that I recall was asked about me, probably, during 2019.

New, Updated, Presenter Permissions

Sometimes things can go wrong in a meeting, especially when there are multiple presenters who have different levels of skills in Teams. That’s why I’m thrilled to share with you an upcoming feature that will give organizations more control over the presenter role permissions in meetings. This feature will be helpful for educators and event hosts who want to avoid unwanted disruptions from attendees assigned as presenters by default. Not to mention attendees with presenter permissions who might remove people from the meeting, when they shouldn’t. Of course, a simple remedy has been to set up co-organizers, presenters and attendees in meeting options. But as we know, while this easy for IT Pros and consultants, it is not something most Teams users know about. Admins can set defaults in TAC (Teams Admin Center), but it doesn’t cover all use cases. For example, in various events or online conferences there are lots of speakers who are promoted to presenters (of course, because without this they could not present… ) and very often they stay as presenters for the rest of the event.

The new feature will allow organizations to limit the presenter role permissions. Where you could use this the EDU (cation) is a great example of this, where students assigned as presenters can remove other students from the meeting. And EDU is not an exception of environments where meeting options set every attendee as presenter by default.

With this upcoming enhancement, organizations can disable the following actions for presenters. Let’s take EDU example about this change:

Disable attendee microphones/cameras (also known as hard mute): Educators no longer need to worry about being muted by students in the classroom
Enable single/all attendee mics/cameras: Educators no longer need to worry about students turning off their cameras or muting them during the meeting.
Change the roles of other participants: Stop other students from presenting by converting them into an attendee.
Lower participants’ hands (including ‘lower all hands’ from the participant roster in-meeting): Stop other students from lowering other students’ hands.
Remove participants: Stop other students from removing participants in the meeting

This table should make it easy to see differences in permissions:

Action	Presenter role currently	After update
Disable Attendee Mics/Cameras (hard mute)	Yes	No
Enable single/all Attendee Mics/Cameras	Yes	No
Change the roles of other participants	Yes	No
Lower participants’ hands (including ‘lower all hands’)	Yes	No
Remove participants	Yes	No

Schedule and feature admin control

This update will be available for both personal and work or school accounts, but not to Microsoft Teams Rooms (at least not yet). As with most of other updates, it will be rolling out gradually, starting from early March 2024 for Targeted Release and early April 2024 for Standard Release.

IT admins can use PowerShell with the following command to turn this feature on or off:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingConfiguration -LimitPresenterRolePermissions (boolean)

This is not yet available, at least I did not find it in my environment.

Source information from Microsoft 365 Admin Center message.

Conclusion

Overall, I think this update will make my Microsoft Teams meetings better, as it reduces unwanted disruptions. If you ask me, large meetings options should have always defined so, that only selected people are presenters and majority of participants are attendees. There are exceptions, of course but for vast majority of large meetings using right meeting options is one step in the list to make those meetings successful ones. Organizations with Teams Premium can use meeting templates to automate meeting options based on meeting types. This of course makes it easy to have right options on.

Meeting roles table

For clarity here is a table of meeting roles and what each role can or can’t do.

Action	Attendee	Presenter currently	Presenter with this update	Meeting organizer	Co-organizer
Reschedule / Cancel the Meeting	No	No	No	Yes	No
Edit meeting details (e.g. update meeting times)	No	No	No	Yes	No
Speak and share video	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Participate in meeting chat	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Present and share content	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Privately view a PowerPoint file shared by someone else	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Take control of someone else’s PowerPoint presentation	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mute other participants	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Disable / Enable Attendee Mics (hard mute)	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Disable / Enable Attendee Cameras	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Lock meeting	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Managed Mode — Bring Attendee on/off Stage	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Lower participants’ hands (including ‘lower all hands’)	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Remove participants	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Add participants	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Admit people from the lobby	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bypass the lobby by default	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Change the roles of other participants	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Start or stop recording	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Remove or change the meeting organizer’s role	No	No	No	No	No
Attendance report	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Start or stop live transcription	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Manage breakout rooms	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Manage recording permissions	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Change meeting options	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Add or remove an app	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
End meeting for all	No	No	No	Yes	Yes

If you think did I use AI to help create this then the answer is yes. I used Copilot in Word to create the first draft of the article and in helping to create tables. I think AI and Copilot as a tool, that helps me to be more productive. But even with AI, there is a need to edit the article, check meeting options, PowerShell, add content that wasn’t in the draft and so on. Admin Center bulletin was used as the source information for this feature, as it is publicly available.