Know Who Attends a Teams Meeting
The ability for meeting organizers to download a participant report for a Teams meeting rolled out in May 2020 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 63351) and should now be available everywhere. The feature is supported in the Windows and Mac desktop clients (but not Linux) and the browser client. The feature is especially popular in education tenants where teachers need to record attendance rosters to note which students attend a class.
Meeting participant (or engagement) reports are disabled by default and need to be enabled by updating the AllowEngagementReport setting in Teams meeting policies. For example, to update the global (default) meeting policy to enable participant reports, run the command:
Set-CSTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowEngagementReport "Enabled"
Downloading a Report
Once the meeting policy assigned to their account has been updated to enable participant reports, meeting organizers will see a download button in the meeting roster screen (Figure 1).
Clicking the button causes Teams to create and download a CSV file called meetingAttendanceList.csv containing participant data to the local workstation. Each record in the file has three fields:
- Full name (account display name).
- Activity (joined – or joined before a meeting starts, left)
- Timestamp.
An example record is shown below.
Tony Redmond Joined 6/9/2020, 4:58:45 PM Michael James Joined before 6/9/2020, 4:58:45 PM Jim Clark Joined before 6/9/2020, 4:58:45 PM Jim Clark Left 6/9/2020, 4:58:57 PM Jim Clark Joined 6/9/2020, 4:58:57 PM
You can open the file with Excel or process it with PowerShell, which might be used to extract data for inclusion in another repository.
Only Available During Active Meetings
It’s important to understand that the participant report is only available while the meeting is active with the participants still present. Once everyone leaves or the meeting is ended, the participant data disappears. If the meeting hasn’t ended and you rejoin it, the only participant information that’s available is the fact that you rejoined. For this reason, you must remember to download the report before you leave a meeting.
The need to grab a participant report when a meeting is active trip has tripped me up several times. It would be much better of Teams allowed more flexible capture of participant data. That might well come in the future.
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Just enabled this today. Thanks for the extra tips.
We have no Skype for Business users enabled so are unable to connect through Powershell to use this cmdlet, is there any other way to enable this without having to enable a user for Skype for Business?
You don’t need anyone enabled for Skype for Business Online. You’re just using the connector to access an endpoint. I don’t have any Skype for Business Online users in my tenant…
Thanks for the reply, could you post the powershell commands used to connect to Skype for Business Online please
I could, but they are easily found with a search…
Yeah I have used the standard commands from Microsoft here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/powershell/manage-skype-for-business-online-with-office-365-powershell
But when running the command:
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
I get the error:
Get-CsOnlinePowerShellEndpoint : The remote name could not be resolved: ‘lyncdiscover.domain.com
What am I doing wrong?
That means that the DNS records for your domain don’t include the lync endpoint. You need to update DNS… and there’s directions about how to do that available online.
Or overide the admindomain URI $sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential -OverrideAdminDomain
yourclouddomain.onmicrosoft.com
If I keep the meeting running in the background, does the attendance report show that i left the meeting?
Hello, I enabled this for our environment and verified that “AllowEngagementReport” now shows “Enabled”, however I don’t see a download button when i’m in the meeting for which I am the organizer for. Any thoughts?
It can take a little time for a policy update to become active. If it doesn’t activate soon, I’d file a support call with Microsoft.
Hi! We enabled this some time ago. But we have a lot of assistants that can make Teams meetings in there managers calendar. The assistants also participate in the meeting but are unable to download the list because the manager is the owner. Is there a solution for this?
Teams doesn’t support delegate access. The solution is to have the assistant create the meeting and make the manager a presenter. Then the assistant can take care of any of the post-processing (sharing video, checking participants, etc.) while the manager gets to make the presentation, lead the meeting, etc.
Hi Tony, thank you for your reply. To bad it doesn’t support it (yet). I understand your ‘work arround’ but it’s not what we are looking for. At least I know for sure that it isn’t configurable.
Thanks and have a nice day!
The following article has instructions to get attendance in Microsoft teams after a meeting.
https://techieberry.com/ms-teams-attendance-report/
That’s for Teams for Education and won’t work in Teams Commercial. Just saying.
Is there a simple way to format the excel file to tell me how long each pupil was in the lesson for? I have exported the .csv but it isn’t particularly easy to tell how long each pupil was in the meeting for, especially when they leave and rejoin. There is also a problem when they joined but haven’t left yet (because I download the report before the end of class).
Thanks for any help!
Wait for the new format attendance report (MC221432, due mid-February). It has a lot more detail and can be downloaded after the class ends. I think you’ll be happy. https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=66459
Hi, as of March 2021. Is this feature still only available during active meetings?
I don’t know if you have it in your tenant yet. There have been some delays in rolling things out. It’s easily checked by seeing if a participant report is available during a meeting. If it is, you have the old-style feature. If not, the new is active.
Hello, we have several teachers at one course and only one (who actually create the team) can download the participant list, although all teachers are actually the owners. Why they cannot download the participant list?
Only the meeting organizer can download the participant list.