How to Limit Who Can Present in Teams Meetings

Refining Teams Meeting Policies

Microsoft issued Office 365 notification MC209349 on 14 April to advertise a bunch of changes to how Teams meetings work. One of those changes is to force external meeting participants to go through the meeting lobby (no automatic join). Another now available is to ability to limit who can present in Teams meetings (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 63206). The presenter role allows a participant to do anything an organizer can, including share content and record the meeting.

Selecting Presenters for Teams Meetings

By default, anyone (including guests) can present in a Teams meeting unless the meeting organizer changes the meeting options to define one or more presenters. Assigning presenters is an oddly convoluted process before the meeting, as you need to:

• Create and send the meeting. Sending the meeting adds the necessary properties to make the meeting an online event.
• Edit the meeting options (in the Teams calendar app). This invokes a web page to display the current meeting settings. You can now change the presenters setting from “Everyone in the meeting” to specific people (Figure 1).

You can also make a participant into a presenter after the meeting starts by selecting their name from the participant list and make them a presenter (Figure 2).

When you schedule a Teams meeting, the default tenant setting for presenter roles taken from the Teams meeting policy assigned to your account is used.

Changing Who Can be a Presenter

You can’t update the setting through the Teams admin center yet (coming soon), but you can in PowerShell by running the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet. The value of the DesignatedPresenterRoleMode setting can be:

• EveryoneUserOverride: Everyone can be a presenter.
• EveryoneInCompanyUserOverride: Only authenticated users can present. This includes tenant and guest users.
• OrganizerOnlyUserOverride: Only the organizer can present.

In all cases, the organizer can override the default setting by assigning specific presenters for a meeting.

To see what the setting is in the meeting policies defined in a tenant, run:

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy | Format-Table Identity, DesignatedPresenterRoleMode

Identity                           DesignatedPresenterRoleMode
--------                           ---------------------------
Global                             EveryoneUserOverride
Tag:RestrictedFunctionality        EveryoneUserOverride

For example, to change the setting in a Teams meeting policy so that only tenant users can be presenters, we’d run a command like:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity RestrictedFunctionality -DesignatedPresenterRoleMode EveryoneInCompanyUserOverride

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This is an example of the kind of change that we see on an ongoing basis. We analyze changes in applications like Teams and update the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook if the change is important enough to warrant inclusion.