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Manage lobby settings and control how and when participants can enter a meeting. 

Quick reference

Manage Lobby Settings

Mange the lobby settings and control how people enter meetings. 

When to use

We review our lobby settings whenever we want to control how participants can enter a meeting we have started. 

Instructions

If we are invited to a meeting, sometimes we can simply join the meeting and, other times, we might be held in the meeting lobby. 

The meeting lobby is a virtual holding area. It allows meeting organizers to control when participants are admitted into the meeting.

This is useful if the organizer has a PowerPoint presentation to load or notes to read through before the meeting commences. It's better to get organized before participants join. 

We can customize our lobby settings in Meeting options before or during the meeting. 

Meeting Options (before meeting)

  • Open the meeting from the calendar.
  • Click the Meeting options button. 

From here we can review our lobby settings. 

  • Click the drop-down arrow next to Who can bypass the lobby?

We can choose groups of people or individuals to bypass the lobby entirely. This means they can join the meeting without having to wait. If we choose Only me, everyone except us will be held in the meeting lobby. 

We can choose the let callers bypass the lobby and if we want to hear a sound when callers join or leave. 

We can specify who can present content in the meeting and if we want to allow the mic and camera for attendees. E.g. to save bandwidth we might want to disable cameras for all attendees. 

The Record automatically option is useful if you are prone to forgetting to start the recording. 

We can also choose if we want to allow participants to use chat in the meeting and react to things and if we want to provide captions. 

Admit People from the Lobby

When someone is waiting in the meeting lobby, the meeting organizer will be informed via a pop-up message. Choose Admit to let the participant into the meeting. Alternatively, we can View Lobby and see everyone who is waiting.

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  • 00:04 I'm sure over the years, you've attended many online meetings.
  • 00:08 And one thing that you may have noticed is that sometimes you can simply jump into
  • 00:14 a meeting, and other times, you're held in what's referred to as the lobby.
  • 00:19 And the lobby is kind of a waiting area where participants are held
  • 00:23 until the host decides to admit them.
  • 00:27 So I do this quite a lot when I'm training.
  • 00:31 Quite often, I have a lot of setup to do before an online training session.
  • 00:36 So I want to get my PowerPoint presentation up,
  • 00:39 I want to sort out my notes.
  • 00:40 And I don't really want to have a bunch of BDIs watching me whilst I'm doing this.
  • 00:46 So what I can do is make sure that my participants are held in the lobby,
  • 00:52 and then let them in when it's convenient to me.
  • 00:55 And we can adjust and set up our lobby settings in meeting options.
  • 01:01 And you can do this prior to the meeting commencing, or
  • 01:04 you can do it once you're in the meeting.
  • 01:06 So if I jump into the meeting early,
  • 01:09 I could quickly change my lobby settings before anybody starts to join.
  • 01:14 Now, we're going to take a look at an example of doing it before the meeting
  • 01:18 commences.
  • 01:19 So you can see here in the calendar, I have a Project Catch-Up Meeting.
  • 01:23 If I double-click to open this up,
  • 01:26 you'll see just above I have a meeting options link.
  • 01:30 And this is where I can essentially define my lobby settings.
  • 01:34 So notice here who can bypass the lobby.
  • 01:38 Now currently, I have this set to people in my organization and guests.
  • 01:43 But if I wanted to hold everybody in the lobby, I could choose only me from here,
  • 01:48 so I'm the only one who can bypass that lobby.
  • 01:52 If I want to, I can toggle this option on to always let callers bypass the lobby.
  • 01:58 And I can choose if I want an announcement when callers join or leave.
  • 02:02 And normally, that's some kind of ding sound, so
  • 02:04 I'm going to keep that turned on.
  • 02:08 I can define who can present in that meeting.
  • 02:10 So if I want to be able to pass control of the mouse around to different meeting
  • 02:15 participants, I'm probably going to want to choose everyone from here.
  • 02:20 But I do have other options if I want to lock that down a little bit more.
  • 02:25 I can choose if I want to allow the microphone or the camera for attendees.
  • 02:29 So by default, because I have this set to Yes when participants join the meeting,
  • 02:35 their microphone and their camera will be activated,
  • 02:38 unless they've chosen to turn either one of those off.
  • 02:42 Now, maybe I'm worried about bandwidth.
  • 02:44 Using your camera does take up a lot of bandwidth.
  • 02:47 Maybe I want to instead disable cameras for all attendees.
  • 02:51 Well, I could do that from here as well.
  • 02:54 Another option that can be really useful is to record automatically.
  • 02:58 I can't tell you how many times I forgot to start the recorder in a meeting.
  • 03:03 So if you want to safeguard against that, you can set this, so
  • 03:06 that it automatically starts recording when the meeting commences.
  • 03:10 You can define if you want to allow meeting chat.
  • 03:13 And I would say that most of the time, it's quite nice to have participants
  • 03:17 utilize that chat panel to have a conversation.
  • 03:20 Do I want to allow reactions?
  • 03:22 So reactions were those little emojis.
  • 03:25 Do I want to allow participants to show that they like something, or
  • 03:29 give a thumbs up?
  • 03:31 Well, yes, I do, because that injects some fun into the meeting.
  • 03:35 Do I want to provide captions?
  • 03:37 Now currently, I have this set to No.
  • 03:39 I can turn on captions in the meeting, but if I want to turn them on permanently,
  • 03:43 I can do that from here also.
  • 03:46 So really, the only setting that I've changed here is who can bypass the lobby.
  • 03:51 So on this meeting, I'm the only one who can bypass.
  • 03:54 Everybody else is going to to be held in the lobby.
  • 03:57 So let's take a look at what that looks like.
  • 04:00 I'm going to make sure that I save at the bottom, and let's close this window down.
  • 04:06 So I'm going to join this meeting, and I'm going to wait for Olivia to also join.
  • 04:11 Notice what I'm getting on the screen.
  • 04:14 I got that little ding ding, which is that announcement that somebody new has
  • 04:18 arrived, and it's telling me that Olivia is waiting in the lobby.
  • 04:22 Now currently on Olivia's screen, she's currently seeing a message that says we've
  • 04:27 let people in the meeting know that you're waiting in the lobby.
  • 04:30 Now here I have two choices.
  • 04:32 I can view the lobby, and
  • 04:34 I can see exactly who's waiting in there, or I could let them in.
  • 04:39 Now if I view the lobby, I can simply let her in by clicking on the tick.
  • 04:43 Or if I want to throw her out at the meeting, I could click on the cross.
  • 04:47 So let's let Olivia into this meeting.
  • 04:52 And there we go, she's now in.
  • 04:55 So definitely worth checking those meeting options.
  • 04:58 If you want to do it whilst you're in the meeting, if you click on More,
  • 05:03 notice you have here meeting options.
  • 05:05 And that's basically going to open up the same thing just
  • 05:09 in a pane on the right hand side.
  • 05:11 You have all the same options, so just go through and set it up how you like.

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