Organizing large Teams meetings

Differentiate Between Presenters and Attendees

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. 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.

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'. This will open a web page where you can define who can present during the meeting. By default, this is set to 'everyone', but this can be changed to 'People in my organization', 'Specific people' or 'Just me'.

When the meeting has started you can see who the presenters are, and who the attendees are. The people that have been given the 'presenter' role can also mute participants, make them a presenter, or remove them from the meeting. To see these options, click on the '...' menu item after the participant's name.

Attendees have limited capabilities in a Teams meeting. In the overview below, you can see the difference between the presenter role and the attendee role.

Automatically mute all attendees

Another very important option in larger meetings is the ability to automatically mute all attendees in the meeting.

Whenever three or more people have joined a meeting, a 'Mute all' option appears. Clicking on the 'Mute all' button will mute everybody but you, so this means that other presenters will also be muted.