Today. I want to show you how you can prevent muting in Microsoft Teams and also remove other participants. Why is this even a problem?
Well, it’s happened a lot where maybe you’re a teacher and you’re trying to run a lecture and you have students who are removing other people from your class. All of a sudden, you go from 30 students in the class to only 15 because someone removed other people. Or maybe one of your students is presenting or asking a question and all of a sudden they stop and you can no longer hear them because another student muted them. Whatever the reason, you have the ability to set up your meeting in such a way that removing attendees and meeting attendees are no longer possible.
I also want to show you how you could squash that behavior mid-lecture when you’re already in the team session. It’s very easy to do. I’m going to show you step-by-step how you can do it. Let’s say that you’re a student, a class clown or a troublemaker who’s been taking advantage of this. I’m sorry, I’m writing this post out, but unfortunately, you’re going to have to find some other ways to have fun. Maybe you could do it with virtual backgrounds.
Prevent muting in Microsoft Teams
- I am in Microsoft Teams and pretend that I’m a teacher and I currently have two of my students in a class. They’re Adele and Emily.
- Now, both Adele and Emily are known to be troublemakers and sometimes they kick other students out of class and sometimes they mute other students in my class.
- I’m going to jump over into Adel’s view. Currently, she could see her, Emily and me. I’m the teacher.
- She could click on Emily and she has a lot of control. Let’s say Emily’s microphone was not muted. Adele could go in and she could mute Emily. She could also remove Emily from the meeting.
- Let’s say there’s a class going on. Adele could simply go down the list and boot everyone from the session.
- As a teacher, I’m not going to find that all that amusing. In fact, I don’t like that at all. Let’s say a meeting is already going on and I have noticed that Adele has been booting people out. How do I prevent that from happening?
- Well, let me go back to my views. I’m the organizer of this meeting, and you see here that everyone here is currently listed as a presenter. What I could do is, if I right click on Adele, I have the option to set her as an attendee.
- I’m going to make Adele an attendee. It asks me to confirm that I want to do that and I’m going to click on “Change.”
- As you see in the text, it says this will affect who can share content, who can mute people, and who can remove people and omit people from the lobby. If I make her an attendee, she no longer has the ability to do any of that.
- What you will see is that now that I have made Adele an attendee, you will see two separate headers. One is the presenter. Previously, everyone was a presenter and now there’s a new header called attendees.
- I’m also going to make Emily an attendee as well. I’m going to right click on her and make her an attendee. Once again, I see that same confirmation message and I’m going to change her as well.
- Now, let me jump into one of their views. I’m in Emily’s view and let’s say that, you know, Emily wants to boot Adele from the session. If she right click on Adele, she no longer has the option to mute. She no longer has the adoption to boot.
- Unfortunately, all she can do is listen in. In fact, even one thing that Emily can’t do is share because she’s no longer a presenter. This effectively prevents other people in a meeting from both muting and removing other attendees once the session is already in progress.
- Now, the trouble is, let’s say you have 30 or 40 people in your Microsoft Teams meetings. It might take time to go through each individual and make them either an attendee or a presenter.
- Is there some way you could do this all? Yes, when you’re setting up a meeting, you can do this. One thing I’m going to do is leave this meeting for now.
Meeting Options
- The way I can do that is to jump into the calendar view in Microsoft Teams and click on the meeting invite that I’m hosting. Click on more options. The option I care about is the one that says meeting options. I’m going to click on meeting options. This is going to send me to a browser where I can now configure settings related to this meeting.
- I have a few different settings, but the one in which I’m interested is the one that says, who can present? What this does is set the role of a participant when they join the meeting and currently it says everyone so whoever joins the meeting automatically becomes a presenter.
- As a presenter, you can both mute and remove other attendees from the meeting. Now, what I could do is go from everyone to just people in my organization.
- Let’s say people in my organization join a meeting and people outside my organization join the meeting. I can limit it. Only people in my organization are classified as presenters or I could define specific people. Maybe Emily’s in my meeting and I want her to be a presenter but Adele always gets into trouble. Let me not make her a presenter; the other option I have is only me.
- What will happen is that when I join the meeting, I will be a presenter, but none of my other participants in the meeting will be a presenter. When I moved Emily and Adele to be attendees and join the meeting, Adele and Emily would just automatically be listed as attendees. I have changed this setting.
- I’m going to jump back into the meeting. You will see when I click on the view here that I’m automatically a presenter, and Adele and Emily are automatically set as attendees.
- If this is a problem in your organization or at your school, set the meeting options so that everyone will automatically become an attendee, including presenters and attendees. These are effectively the permissions that a user has.
- As a presenter, you have more permissions than others. You can share your screen, you can mute, you could remove, you could accept people from the lobby or you couldn’t accept people from the lobby.
- Adele and Emily are the only attendees. They can’t present their screen, they can’t move, they can’t remove, they can’t accept people from the lobby.
Other settings
- What I also want to show are some of the other settings that you have. I’m going to jump back into the meeting options. Some of the things I also have control over, as I can define who can bypass the lobby.
- I can let everyone bypass the lobby by simply checking it and turning it on to yes. Or it could force people to come in through the lobby and allow me to accept it. Let’s say that your students forward your class to many other students and you have people joining your class who you’ve never seen before. You can use these controls to limit who can join.
- Next, there’s another feature here that says in the announcement that callers join or leave. Maybe you have a student joining 10 minutes in and you want to be aware that they’ve joined or maybe a student leaves early and you want to make sure you’re aware of that. I personally think it’s annoying every time it announces when someone joins or leaves but depending on your situation, this could be useful or maybe not.
All right. That was just a quick tutorial showing you how to prevent muting in Microsoft Teams and also remove others from your meeting.
Also read: MS Teams Attendance Report: The Powerful Guide
For more information, visit the Microsoft article.
If you have any other ideas that you want to see me cover in the future, leave a comment down below.
