Make sure students are attendees by default in Microsoft Teams meetings

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Microsoft recently announced a change to meeting policies where a Teams Service admin can make sure users are attendees by default, rather than presenters.

This can be especially valuable in education, where students with the presenter role can misbehave by muting the teacher and removing others from the meeting entirely.

So let’s apply this change to an existing meeting policy using PowerShell.

First run the New-CsOnlineSession cmdlet and login using your admin credentials.

# Connect to Skype PowerShell
$CSSession = New-CsOnlineSession
Import-PSSession $CSSession -AllowClobber

# choose teacher policy from grid view and store to variable
$Policy = Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy | select Identity, Description | Out-GridView -PassThru

Then choose the appropriate meeting policy from the grid view and click OK.

policy teachers

 

We then need to update the policy to change the DesignatedPresenterRoleMode attribute to OrganizerOnlyUserOverride.

# change policy
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity $Policy.Identity -DesignatedPresenterRoleMode OrganizerOnlyUserOverride

# verify results
Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity $Policy.Identity | select Identity, DesignatedPresenterRoleMode

The end result should be something like this.

tag teachers

You now need to wait… and wait some more… and in about 24 hours you should see that  students will be attendees by default in any new meetings organized by a teacher with the policy applied.

22 thoughts on “Make sure students are attendees by default in Microsoft Teams meetings”

  1. This is great – thank you! I couldn’t work out if you apply this to students or teachers, but you’ve cleared it up… one question…does this apply to ‘Meet Now’ within channels too? Or just to scheduled meetings?

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      • Perfect – I can confirm this is the case with both scheduled meetings and ‘Meet Now’ within a Teams Channel. It applies to everyone apart from the meeting organiser – so other staff join as attendees too, which the organiser can change manually of course

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  2. I’v try with polices named “kiosk” and have that error. What’s wrong?

    Set or Remove host tag instance is not allowed
    + CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (Tag:Kiosk:String) [Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy], ArgumentException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidUpdate,Microsoft.Rtc.Management.Internal.SetTeamsMeetingPolicyCmdlet

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  4. I have created a team with a co-teacher and we both need control of the meeting I have a student Who is marked as an attendee and has been kicking me off, muting me and creating his own meeting that other students went into how can I fix this????

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    • If the student is in fact an attendee in that meeting he does not have permissions to mute you or kick you out of the meeting. If this is still happening you need to contact support at aka.ms/edusupport. If he’s able to schedule meetings and shouldn’t IT needs to assign a meeting policy with meeting scheduling disabled.

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      • Dear Magnus i tried it and still when i start the meeting in meet now the user are not attendees and it’s now 3 days that i run the shell

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      • what i did is i run the power to a policy already created and have all my students in it and i have created the classes with there corresponding teachers.
        when i start the meeting as a teachers my students are still not attendee by default.
        What do u mean assign the policy to meeting organizers

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  8. in my case organizer will admin and the teacher as a presenter but when I run this script the teacher also getting into attendee so can there is the way only the organizer and presenter other make as an attendee

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