Microsoft Teams: Meeting Security

This article provides a brief summary of the settings available in Microsoft Teams Meetings to deter unwanted visitors to your meetings.

Overview

OIT recommends the following Teams security settings for all your Teams meetings. It is the meeting organizer’s responsibility to adopt and put into practice safeguards to deter unwanted visitors in your Teams meetings.

Before a Meeting

Allow Authenticated Users

When creating a meeting invitation, use the “Add Required Attendees” selection list to enter meeting participants. This will ensure the invitation and meeting goes to their UTK email inbox. Meeting participants will need to login and authenticate to their Teams account prior to joining.

Response Options

By default, Response Options are set to Allow Forwarding of a meeting invitation. To further secure your meeting and limit the audience that has access to the meeting invitation, confirm that Allow Forwarding is NOT selected.

This option will not prevent someone from copying and pasting the meeting invitation into a new email.

Meeting Options

Waiting Room or Lobby

To avoid unauthenticated visitors to your meeting, it is recommended that you use a lobby in which participants can wait to be admitted.

Meeting options will allow you to revise the rules for a lobby. These can be found in the right-hand panel available during the initial meeting set-up or from the Meeting Options link within the meeting event. When creating the meeting, select Options to view the dropdown for who can bypass the lobby. By default, it is set to People within the UTK organization and guests; however, a good practice is to limit the bypassing of the lobby to meeting organizers and co-organizers.

Once you are ready for the meeting to begin, select the Participants tab in the toolbar. A Participants tab will open on the right-hand side. Your options are to admit participants individually or you can admit all.

Who Can Present

By default, Meeting Options are set to Everyone can present. It may be helpful to limit this to organizers or specific people. Meeting options can be revised during a meeting allowing organizers to change a participant’s role from attendee to presenter.

Disallow Mics and Cameras

You can further limit participants by turning their mics and cameras off upon entering the meeting. This option can be changed during the meeting.

During a Meeting

Lock Your Meeting

Once you and your invited participants are present in your meeting, you can lock your meeting to prevent any future attempts of uninvited visitors from joining the meeting.

1. Select the Participants tab.
2. Select the ellipsis (…)
3. Select Lock the Meeting.
4. Select Lock.

You can reopen the meeting by repeating these steps and selecting Unlock the meeting and confirming Unlock.

Minimizing Disruption During a Meeting

If intruders do disrupt your meeting, you can quickly remove them from the meeting.

1. Selecting the Participants in the Meeting toolbar.
2. Select the ellipsis (…) to the right of the individual’s name.
3. Select Remove from Meeting.

In the event of an unauthorized intrusion during the meeting, we ask that the meeting host report the incident by notifying the OIT HelpDesk and providing details related to the meeting. Should the incident be considered abusive or criminal in nature, the instructor or host must report the incident to the UT Police Department for investigation.