How to Assign Presenters in a Teams Meeting

Tony Redmond

6 years ago

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.

Figure 1: Details of a Teams meeting in the Calendar app

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.

Figure 2: Assigning who can present in a Teams meeting

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).