Roles in a Teams meeting

Tags teams

If you're organizing a meeting with multiple attendees, you may want to assign roles to each participant to determine who can do what in the meeting. 

There are two roles to choose from: presenter and attendee. Presenters can do just about anything that needs doing in a meeting, while the role of an attendee is more controlled. 

Below are the specific capabilities of each role:

Capability Organizer Presenter Attendee
Speak and share video YES YES YES
Participate in meeting chat YES YES YES
Share content YES YES NO
Privately view a PowerPoint file shared by someone else YES YES YES
Take control of someone else's PowerPoint presentation YES YES NO
Mute other participants YES YES NO
Prevent attendees from unmuting themselves YES YES NO
Remove participants YES YES NO
Admit people from the lobby YES YES NO
Change the roles of other participants YES YES NO
Start or stop recording YES YES NO
Start or stop live transcription YES YES NO
Manage breakout rooms YES NO NO
Change meeting options YES NO NO
Add or remove an app YES YES NO
Use an app* YES YES YES
Change app settings YES YES NO

* – Some apps may limit what certain roles can do.

Change meeting roles

Before a meeting

You'll need to send out the meeting invite before you can assign roles.

Once you've done that, go to Calendar Schedule a meeting button, double-click the meeting you just created, and select Meeting options.

This will bring you to a web page, where you'll see a few choices under Who can present?

Who can present?

What happens

Everyone

Anyone who has access to the meeting link will join the meeting as a presenter. 

People in my organization

Only people in your org will be presenters. External participants will join as attendees.

Specific people

Only people you choose from the list of invitees will be presenters. Everyone else will join as attendees.

Only me

Only the organizer will be a presenter. All other participants will join as attendees.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

  • You'll need to send your meeting invite directly to anyone you want to select as a presenter.

  • The role of the meeting organizer can't be changed.

Note: The ability to select specific presenters isn't yet available for channel meetings. 

During a meeting

There are two ways to change someone's role while a meeting is in progress:

  • Go to Calendar Meetings button,double-click the meeting, and select Meeting options. Use the dropdown menu for Who can present? to select a new presenter.

Note: If the meeting is recurring, any change you make in Meeting options will apply to all meeting occurrences.

  • Select Show participants in the meeting controls to see a list of all the people in the meeting.
    Hover over the name of the person whose role you want to change and select More options. From there, select Make a presenter or Make an attendee.

Notes: 

  • If the meeting is recurring, role assignments made in this way will only apply to the current meeting. For future occurrences, participants will keep the role assigned to them on the Meeting options page.

  • If someone exits the meeting and then rejoins it later, they'll rejoin with the last role they were assigned.

Lock a meeting

In a Teams meeting, meeting organizers can choose to lock their meetings to prevent subsequent join attempts. Anyone attempting to join a locked meeting from any device will be informed that the meeting is locked.

To lock a meeting from a desktop, select Schedule a meeting > Join > Participants > ... > Lock the meeting (or unlock it when locked).

From a mobile device: Schedule a meeting > Join > ...  (in the meeting toolbar) > Lock meeting.

When a meeting is locked, no additional participants will be able to join, but invitees can still access the meeting chat, recording, and other meeting info.

 

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