In this guide, we discuss how we can prevent unwelcome guests from joining our online lessons in Microsoft Teams.
Enable lobby for all Class Teams meetings in your school.
Making sure the meeting policy for teachers within this school’s tenancy is set so that the lobby is enabled.
Firstly, make sure your meeting policy for teachers is set within the school’s tenancy to enable the lobby.
By default, all attendees enter the session through the lobby, which means you’re able to accept or reject members coming into the session, allowing you to avoid any unwelcome guests attending your session at all.
Enable lobby for a specific Class Teams meeting.
If the lobby isn’t automatically enabled for teachers in your school, you can choose to enable the lobby manually on your meetings and classes.
Once you set up and save your meeting, you can then select Edit.
Select Meeting Options and then set the Who can bypass the lobby? option to Only me.
How to spot an unwelcome guest in your Class Teams meeting.
As students enter the meeting lobby, you can see their names and icons appearing in the Participants panel.
One sign of a user who isn’t supposed to be in the meeting is they will usually have (Guest) after their name.
However, it’s crucial to bear in mind that some legitimate students may appear to be guests for several reasons.
Students may share devices with family members and could be joining on other accounts with names you do not recognise. To prevent confusion, you should remind students to sign into their own accounts before joining Teams lessons. By establishing this rule, you can prevent students from missing out on crucial lesson time and learning resources, as well as keep the class safe from unwelcome guests.
How to remove an unwelcome guest from the Teams desktop app.
Select the red cross beside the user you suspect is an unwelcome guest and that removes them from the lobby and denies them access to the lesson.
Note: They can attempt to rejoin, but they’re flagged up in the lobby area with no access to your online lesson.
Select the green tick beside your students’ names to admit them to the lesson.
How to remove an unwelcome guest from the browser version of Teams.
As students enter the lobby, a notification shows on the navigation bar.
While you can admit students from this notification by selecting Accept, we strongly recommend selecting View Lobby to bring up a list of users in the lobby.
Alternatively, you can also select the View Participants icon on the navigation bar.
When you can view a list of users who are waiting in the lobby and follow the same steps as you would in the desktop app:
Select the red cross beside the user you suspect is an unwelcome guest, and that removes them from the lobby and denies them access to the lesson.
Note: They can attempt to rejoin, but they’re flagged in the lobby area with no access to your online lesson.
Select the green tick beside your students’ names to admit them to the lesson.
What happens if I accidentally admit an unwelcome guest into my Class Teams meeting?
Select the three dots (…) next to the unwelcome guest’s name to bring up several options.
Choose Remove from meeting to kick the unwelcome guest out of the lesson.
Watch our step-by-step video guide on how to deal with unwanted guests in Class Teams meetings:
If you have any questions on how to deal with unwanted guests in Class Teams meetings, please contact a member of our team today.
