Add and Manage Meeting Participants

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Add and manage additional participants to a call that's already in progress.

Quick reference

Add and Manage Meeting Participants

Add and manage participants in a meeting. 

When to use

Add participants to a meeting whenever you want to invite someone to join the conversation. 

Instructions

Participants are the people in the meeting. We can see the meeting participants by opening the People pane in a meeting. 

Add Other Participants

We can add other participants to the meeting at any time. 

  • Open the People pane. 
  • Type a name in the search bar. 
  • Select the person to add.
  • Click Request to join. 

If we are adding someone who is part of our organization, we can simply type the name and select them. If we are adding someone outside our organization, we need to type the full email address and invite them. 

Depending on our meeting settings, newly invited participants will be able to join the meeting immediately or they will be held in the lobby until the meeting organizer lets them in. 

Lock the Meeting

We can prevent anyone else from entering the meeting by locking the meeting. 

  • From the People pane, click the three dots. 
  • Choose Lock this meeting from the list. 

Manage Participants

As the meeting organizer, we can manage our meeting participants. 

We can mute everyone's microphone by clicking the Mute all button. This is useful if we are presenting to large numbers or people as it will prevent distracting background noise. Use the Chat panel to have conversations instead. 

  • Hover the mouse over a participant. 
  • Click the three dots. 
Pin for me

In a meeting, the person speaking will show the largest in the Teams window.

This means that we will see a different person in a larger window depending on who is speaking. If we want to put focus on a specific person, we can choose Pin for me. This changes the focus for us only and doesn't affect how others are viewing speakers. 

Spotlight for everyone

As the meeting organizer, we can choose to Spotlight for everyone. This is similar to Pin for me but it affects everyone's Teams view. This is useful if one person is presenting or will be doing the majority of the speaking as the focus will stay on them. 

Make an attendee

We can make any participant an attendee or presenter. Presenters have more control over a meeting than an attendee does.

Remove from meeting

We can throw anyone out of the meeting by choosing Remove from meeting.

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  • 00:04 The participants are the people taking part in your meeting.
  • 00:08 And we can see all of our meeting participants by opening up the people
  • 00:12 panel, or the participants panels it used to be known in the menu bar at the top.
  • 00:17 So if you take a look currently in this meeting, I am a participant,
  • 00:22 as is Olivia Marshall.
  • 00:24 And adding more participants to this call is extremely straightforward,
  • 00:28 notice underneath I have some suggestions of other people I might want to invite
  • 00:33 to this meeting.
  • 00:34 And if I can't see them there,
  • 00:36 I can always use this search at the top to search for somebody to add.
  • 00:41 Now if they are a member of your organization,
  • 00:43 you'll typically need to just type in their name and it will bring them up.
  • 00:46 For example, I could type in Ben.
  • 00:52 Up here, and then I can simply request for him to join the meeting.
  • 00:56 Now if you want to invite somebody who's outside of your organization or a guest,
  • 01:01 then you're going to need to type in the entire email address in here.
  • 01:05 And those people will receive a link to join this meeting.
  • 01:09 Now Depending on your lobby settings, newly invited participants will
  • 01:13 either be led straight into the meeting, or they'll be held in the meeting
  • 01:18 lobby until the meeting organiser in this case me, lets them in.
  • 01:22 And we're going to talk more about that in the next lesson.
  • 01:26 Now it might be that I want to stop anybody else from entering this meeting.
  • 01:30 So what I can do, is where we have three dots next to participants,
  • 01:35 I can choose to lock this meeting down.
  • 01:37 So it means that nobody else can join this meeting,
  • 01:40 it's just going to be the people who are currently in the call.
  • 01:43 Now as the meeting organizer, you have a number of different controls when it
  • 01:48 comes to managing your participants.
  • 01:50 For example, I can choose to mute everybody's microphone.
  • 01:55 And this is sometimes particularly useful if you're hosting a very large meeting.
  • 01:59 I know that in my role, I tend to run training sessions on teams,
  • 02:03 where I might have 200 people on the call.
  • 02:06 And it's just really not very practical for everybody to have their microphones
  • 02:11 on, where we can hear the background noise of 200 different participants.
  • 02:16 So quite often I will click Mute all to Mute everybody's microphones.
  • 02:22 And if everybody is muted, this is where the chat panel comes in really handy,
  • 02:26 because it means that people can still talk to each other,
  • 02:30 they can talk to you as the host or presenter.
  • 02:32 But it's a little bit easier to manage through chat than it is with everybody
  • 02:37 speaking.
  • 02:37 And of course you can manage this,
  • 02:39 you can unmute specific people if you want to hear what they have to say.
  • 02:43 And remember if you need to mute your own mic,
  • 02:46 you have your mute button at the top here, keyboard shortcut Ctrl Shift M.
  • 02:50 Now when it comes to our participants, what other options do we have?
  • 02:54 Well, if we click on the three dots,
  • 02:57 we have a few things listed in this menu, the first one here is pin for me.
  • 03:02 Now what pin does, is it puts focus on that specific person from my view only.
  • 03:09 What you're noticing teens,
  • 03:10 is that whoever is speaking will tend to show larger in the window.
  • 03:14 But if I want to always show Olivia as the focus, then I can simply pin her.
  • 03:20 And it doesn't pin her for everybody, it specifically for my view only.
  • 03:26 Now if we go back to the three dots, I'm going to say unpin,
  • 03:29 because the other option we have here is a spotlight for everyone.
  • 03:33 Now that is basically the same as pinning,
  • 03:36 except it means that Olivia is now pinned for everybody in the meeting.
  • 03:41 So regardless of who is speaking,
  • 03:43 Olivia is always going to be in the largest window.
  • 03:47 So this is a particularly good option,
  • 03:49 if one person is going to be doing the majority of the speaking in the session.
  • 03:53 So maybe they're doing a presentation or maybe some training.
  • 03:56 So just be aware of that minor difference between those two features.
  • 04:01 If we click again, I'm going to say Stop spotlighting,
  • 04:04 because the final two options here are pretty straightforward.
  • 04:08 I can make Olivia an attendee.
  • 04:11 And what you can do here, is you can switch between making people attendees or
  • 04:15 presenters.
  • 04:16 And in general,
  • 04:17 presenters have slightly more control over the meeting than a regular attendee does.
  • 04:22 And finally I have a Remove for meeting option if I for
  • 04:26 some reason need to boot Olivia out.
  • 04:29 So those are the different options you have when it comes to adding participants
  • 04:33 to a call that's currently in progress, and
  • 04:36 managing those participants when you're in the call.

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