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Presenters and Attendees Have Different Rights in a Meeting
One of the biggest complaints about Teams meetings has been the lack of support for roles, specifically not being able to designate presenters for a meeting like you can in Skype for Business Online. In one of the blogs released for the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference, the Teams development group promised to deliver:
“New presenter and attendee controls allow meeting organizers to pre-define presenter and attendee roles for meeting participants. Designated presenters will have full control over the meeting, whereas participants in “attendee” role won’t have ability to share content, take control, mute or remove other participants, admit people waiting in the lobby, or start/stop recordings.”
The feature is now generally available and is being rolled out across Office 365. Even though its implementation is not well integrated into the Teams client, being able to designate presenters is very welcome.
Teams Meeting Roles
When you create a Teams meeting, you are the organizer and everyone else is a presenter and can share content during the meeting, admit people from the lobby, and start or stop recordings (see Microsoft’s documentation for a comparison of the different roles in a meeting). In a nutshell, presenters have the same rights as an organizer, so it’s obviously a good thing to limit the number of privileged users when many participants join a meeting (the need to restrict permissions is much less evident in small meetings).
Assigning Meeting Presenters
After creating a meeting, you can nominate people as presenters (and make everyone else an attendee with limited rights). To do this, select the meeting in the Teams calendar app (Figure 1) and click Meeting options.
Because only people who are invited directly to a meeting can be presenters, the option to assign people as presenters isn’t yet available for meetings created in a channel. In other words, only personal meetings created in Outlook or the Teams calendar app support presenter assignment at present.
Instead of opening a tab within the app, Teams opens a web page to display the meeting options. You can now opt for:
- Everyone (any participant who joins the meeting can present).
- People in my organization.
- Specific people. Before a meeting starts, you can select any tenant user who is explicitly added as a meeting participant to be a presenter. You can’t preassign external participants. However, once the meeting starts, you can update the status of an external participant and make them a presenter.
- Only me (the organizer) can present.
In Figure 2, I’ve selected two of the attendees as presenters (the organizer can always present). However, the third selected person can’t be found even though they are in the participant list. This is because this participant is a guest user and you can’t nominate a guest user (or anyone outside the organization) to be a presenter. As noted above, once the meeting starts, you can update the role of an external person to allow them to present.
If the meeting is recurring, the assignments persist for all instances of the meeting.
Note: The Teams Meeting add-in for Outlook can also update settings for a Teams meeting.
Changing Roles
It would be nice if we always knew the exact set of presenters for a meeting before it took place, but that’s not always the case. During a meeting, if you want to assign someone else as a presenter, you can do by editing the presenter list through Meeting options in the Calendar app.
Alternatively, click the Show participants icon in the meeting controls and find the person you want to be a presenter in the list, and then select Make a presenter from the right-click (…) menu (Figure 3).
There’s no way to set up default presenters for meetings scheduled by an account. Each meeting must be configured seperately.
There’s lots to learn about how Teams work. To get a head start or stay ahead of changes, read the chapters in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
we would change the default config of the presenter roles. i think there must be a way to change it by powershell.
what do you think?
There’s no PowerShell cmdlets available to control these roles. At least, not yet!
Is there a limitation on the number of Presenters?
As everyone in a meeting can be a presenter, the limit is 250.
Even people outside the Organization that is in the Live meeting as a guest?
Yes. A guest user can be a presenter, providing they switch to your tenant before joining the event.
I don’t have the option “Meeting options” so this is not possible for me to do. How do I enable this?
I’d ask Microsoft. I checked again this morning and the option works the way described in the post.
When you are first setting up the meeting the option is not there. After you save the meeting you can open the meeting from the calendar and the option is now available.
when i choose meeting options i had this message, the system remembers an old account. how to change login informations to access to the meeting options
Sign out from Teams,, delete the Teams cache, and try again.
Cache: C:\Users\…\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\Cache
How about if I created this meeting from a shared mailbox account? How can I adjust the presenters then? Because I can only see and edit my personal meetings via TEAMS, the shared mailbox meetings are created via Outlook.
I wouldn’t create Teams meetings from a Shared mailbox account. In fact, I have never tried to do this and don’t see how it could work because you’d need to log into the shared mailbox account to be able to access Teams as the shared mailbox…. In any case, I don’t know if Microsoft would support this.
Hi, is there a way to have a presenter video always visible, while having other guests with video also become visible when they speak in addition to the presenter?
Not now. I think this will come in the Dynamic View promised in Wednesday’s announcements.
Hi, I sent a MS team meeting invite & on the meeting date itself, all the invited guests & including myself weren’t allowed to enter the meeting, was there any reason for that occurrence? BTW, my invite was forwarded by many invitees & wondering was this one of the reason?
If a user is promoted to Presenter, can that user in turn promote another attendee to Presenter role or is that restricted to the Organizer?
Yes. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/roles-in-a-teams-meeting-c16fa7d0-1666-4dde-8686-0a0bfe16e019
How to become Presenter if a person is attendee?
The organizer of the meeting can make any participant a presenter during the meeting by selecting them from the meeting roster and updating their role.
hi
i need to assign more than one presenter in the meeting and add a channel, it’s not working unless the meeting starts then i can assign the presenter during the meeting
what i need is assign the presenter before the meeting start with channel meeting.
if i don’t add a channels in my meeting i can assign presenter but with channels meeting i can’t.
what the solution !!
I wanted to make other attendee as a Presenter as I wont be attending the meeting, i do not see any option to make someone a presenter even before the start of the meeting?
Edit the meeting settings and you can choose who will present before the meeting.
Is setting presenters to all the only way to allow external users to present? Is there a section in the book dedicated to external users and Teams meetings? I also wonder on which occasions external users are asked to authenticate – is this only if anonymous join is turned off?
1) Making external users presenters is the way to allow them to present.
2) The book covers many things, but getting to the detail of every single thing an external user can do and can’t do in meetings is not what we cover.
3) If anonymous join is turned off, all participants must authenticate. At that point, whether they see a prompt depends on if they have valid credentials (access tokens).
Thanks Tony for the quick reply!
1) External users cannot be selected individually in the meetings options “Who can present?” section like internal users can. Or have I missed a setting/policy somewhere. So I currently just choose all. In the actual meeting I then have the ability to set non presenters to attendees but this is a back to front way of doing things
2) I am involved in arranging meetings with primarily external users and I experience a lot of quirks relating to external users functions which leave me a bit nervous! Today in one such meeting an external user was able to share a presentation but during presenting her ability to turn her microphone on or off disappears. The microphone must be turned on before sharing the presentation. If not they had to stop sharing then turn the mic on and then present again. I haven’t seen this in my internal meetings.
3) Thanks!
As noted in https://office365itpros.com/2019/12/09/assign-presenters-teams-meeting/, you can’t preassign external participants to be a presenter by updating meeting options. Once the meeting starts, you can change anyone, including external participants, to be a presenter. Re. 2, sounds like a bug that you should report to Microsoft.
I was able to make my co-teachers Presenters in our recurring class meeting series. However, when I send them to Breakout Rooms with students, they are no longer able to present. Sometimes my co-teachers really need to be able to present in the small group they are leading, but I can’t always keep them in the main room with me (I can’t send myself to breakout rooms either). Any idea on how to change things so that Presenters in a meeting retain their ability to present once in Breakout Rooms?
This is an excellent question that we are trying to find the answer to at my school as well. Any solutions out there yet?
The same question apparently: I need myself and several more people who help me on the course to be able to go in and out the breakup rooms during the same meeting (we have more than 130 students in the class). What is the best way to arrange this?
This is a common request and I believe Microsoft is working on the ability to assign presenter status for different rooms. You can support the Teams User Voice request at https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/42175363-breakout-room-co-hosting to make sure that Microsoft knows what you need.
Has the number you can have at a Teams increased to 1000 ?
The number of what? Participants at a Teams meeting remains at 350 unless the organizer has a Teams advanced communications license.
Hi Tony, not sure if this is an old thread but trying to clarify making an external person a presenter. I recently ran a teams meeting where I made an external person a presenter once the ‘pre-meeting’ started and they uploaded their slides etc but they were not able to see all the other attendees then and tell who was speaking. Is there a way round this please?
Did the external person have a guest account in your tenant or were they an anonymous join?
above GUI only ? I need power shell cmd
Use the Graph API to update presenters for a meeting: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/onlinemeeting-update?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
Can 2 people be designated the organizer ???
No. There is only one organizer for a meeting.
Can you designate someone a co-organizer ??
Does anyone know why CVI endpoints come in as presenter by default? I have not designated them as presenter but every vc room via cvi comes in as presenter.
There are no participants showing to select to create a co-organiser even though they’re on the diary invite, how do I rectify this?
I don’t know exactly what state your meeting is in.
In these kind of situations, I sometimes think it is easier to recreate the meeting with the settings that you want than to attempt to debug why a condition occurred. It’s just a pragmatic solution.
Whiteboard feature, Meeting Breakout rooms creation before starting the meeting and the recreating breakout rooms is not visible if i am creating the organiser rights to the person through API.