Roles in a meeting in Microsoft Teams

It can be useful to assign roles to each attendee to determine who will be able to do what during the meeting when you’re organising a meeting with multiple attendees.

It is possible to choose between two roles: that of a presenter or that of an attendee. The ability of an attendee to participate in almost anything at a meeting is limited, whereas the ability of a presenter to participate in almost anything at a meeting is more flexible than that of an attendee.

Each of these roles has specific capabilities that can be found below:

Capability	Organizer	Presenter	Attendee
Speak and share video
Participate in meeting chat
Share content
Privately view a PowerPoint file shared by someone else
Take control of someone else’s PowerPoint presentation
Mute other participants
Prevent attendees from unmuting themselves
Remove participants
Admit people from the lobby
Change the roles of other participants
Start or stop recording
Start or stop live transcription
Manage breakout rooms
Change meeting options
Add or remove an app
Use an app*
Change app settings

In some apps, certain roles may not be able to perform certain tasks.

Change meeting roles

Before a meeting

If you want to assign roles for the meeting, you must first send out the invitation to the meeting.

In this case, all you need to do is go to Calendar , click on the Meeting you just created on the calendar, and pick the options you wish to use for your meeting by clicking on the options you choose.

There are a number of options under Who can present on this site that you will find in response to the request that you submit.

I would like to remind you of the following points:

• In order to invite anyone you want to be a presenter at your meeting, you will need to send out a meeting invitation directly to them.
• In the case of the person who is responsible for organizing a meeting, it is not possible to change their role at all.

During a meeting

In the course of a meeting, if someone’s role needs to be changed, there are two ways to do it:

• Select the Meeting Options option from the Meeting options menu in the Calendar, and then double-click the meeting. You can select who can present from the dropdown menu located under Who can present? The presenter must be selected in order for the presentation to go ahead.

• To see a list of all people who are present in the meeting, select Show participants in the meeting controls from the meeting controls menu.
  You can change the role of a person by hovering your cursor over his or her name and selecting More options. In order to become a presenter or attendee, select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu.

Notes: 

• It is important to understand that, if you assign roles to repeating meetings in the same manner as described above, you will only be able to apply them to the repeating meeting in that particular case. On the Meeting options page, participants will be able to see the roles that have been assigned to them for future occurrences.
• When someone leaves a meeting and then returns later on a different day, one can expect that the role in which they last participated will be assigned to them when they rejoin the meeting later on in the day.

Lock a meeting

Team meeting organizers have the option of locking their meetings in such a way that, if subsequent attempts are made to join the meeting, the meeting will not be accepted. Anyone trying to join a locked meeting using any device will be notified that they will not be able to join due to the meeting being locked.

When locking a meeting from the desktop, you first choose to schedule a meeting > Join > Participants and then select the Lock session (or unlock the session if the meeting is already locked) option.

It is possible to schedule and join a meeting using a mobile device (in the meeting toolbar) and then lock the meeting using the same device.

There is a lock that is applied when an invitee cannot join the meeting, but even when it is locked, participants can still access the meeting chat, the recording, and other meeting information, including the agenda.

Frequently Asked Questions