Set students to attendee by default in Microsoft Teams meetings

It’s finally here. You can now set students to the attendee role by default in Microsoft Teams meetings.

Today Microsoft released a boat load of additional Microsoft Teams meeting policy settings. Most of them are useful, but the most important one for schools is the Designated presenter role mode setting.

This allows administrators to automatically set the Who can present?” option in meetings to one of four values:

• EveryoneUserOverride: All meeting participants can be presenters. This is the default value. This parameter corresponds to the Everyone setting in Teams.
  
• EveryoneInCompanyUserOverride: Authenticated users in the organization, including guest users, can be presenters. This parameter corresponds to the People in my organization setting in Teams.
  
• EveryoneInSameAndFederatedCompanyUserOverride: Authenticated users in the organization, including guest users and users from federated organizations, can be presenters. This parameter corresponds to the People in my organization and trusted organizations setting in Teams.
  
• OrganizerOnlyUserOverride: Only the meeting organizer can be a presenter and all meeting participants are designated as attendees. This parameter corresponds to the Only me setting in Teams.

The option that schools will be interested in is OrganizerOnlyUserOverride. Enabling this policy setting will result in only the meeting organiser — usually the teacher — being given the presenter role in meetings automatically, set students to the attendee role, and prevent them taking over the meeting.

Previously the only way to prevent students muting others was to either schedule each meeting before hand or manually set the student to be an attendee during the lesson.

Currently, you can only use PowerShell to configure this policy setting. You can edit an existing Teams meeting policy by using the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet. Or, create a new Teams meeting policy by using the New-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet and assign it to users.

For more information, or to review the other new policy settings, take a look a the documentation here.

It’s worth remembering that meeting organizers can still change this setting in Teams and choose who can present in the meetings that they schedule.