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IT Admins - Control who can bypass the meeting lobby in Microsoft Teams

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Microsoft Teams

APPLIES TO: ✔️Meetings ✔️Webinars ✖️Town halls

The Teams meeting lobby prevents certain types of participants from joining a meeting until a meeting organizer, co-organizer, or presenter admits them. When a participant goes to the lobby, organizers, co-organizers, and presenters are notified and can choose to admit them to the meeting or not.

Using the lobby settings in the Teams admin center, you can create defaults for which types of meeting participants are able to bypass the lobby and which participants must wait there until admitted to the meeting. You can control how the following types of participants interact with the lobby:

  • Meeting organizer and co-organizers
  • People in your organization
  • Guests
  • People in trusted organizations
  • Anonymous participants

Prerequisites for meeting with people outside your organization

There are several settings in Teams that control whether people outside the organization can interact with Teams. The following settings must be enabled for people outside the organization to join meetings:

  • Guest access in Teams must be enabled for guests to be able to join meetings. Guests aren't anonymous and can log into your organization.
  • External access must be enabled for people in trusted organizations to join meetings. A mutual trust between your organization and the external organization must be configured. In addition, the meeting organizer in your organization and any participants from the external organization must be enabled for external access.
  • Anonymous meeting join must be enabled if you want to allow anonymous meeting participants.

Important

If any of these settings are turned off, that type of external participant can't join meetings in your org regardless of lobby settings.

Overview of lobby settings and policies

The following table shows the Teams meeting policies that affect how meeting participants interact with the lobby.

Setting Description
Anonymous users and dial-in callers can start a meeting This per-organizer policy allows for leaderless meetings. This setting controls whether anonymous participants and dial-in users can join the meeting without a verified participant in attendance. This setting only applies when Who can bypass the lobby is set to Everyone. If the Anonymous users can join a meeting organization-level setting or meeting policy is Off, this setting only applies to dial-in callers. By default, this setting is turned off to prevent anonymous users from misusing your meeting links.

While Off, anonymous participants and dial-in users wait in the lobby until a verified participant (including a dial-in organizer) joins the meeting, at which point they're automatically admitted. Once the meeting starts, anonymous participants and dial-in users join the call automatically, even if the organizer leaves.

If this setting is On, anonymous and dial-in participants can start and join the meeting without a verified participant present.
People dialing in can bypass the lobby This is a per-organizer policy. This setting controls whether people who dial in by phone join the meeting directly or wait in the lobby. When this setting is Off, dial-in users wait in the lobby until an organizer, co-organizer, or presenter joins the meeting and admits them. When this setting is On, dial-in users automatically join the meeting without going through the lobby. (If Anonymous users and dial-in callers can start a meeting is Off, they wait in the lobby until the meeting starts.)
Who can bypass the lobby This is a per-organizer policy. This setting controls which types of participants (except participants dialing in by phone) join a meeting directly. This policy also controls which types of participants wait in the lobby until an organizer, co-organizer, or presenter admits them.

The following table shows how each option for the Who can bypass the lobby policy affects each type of meeting participant.

Policy value: Everyone People in my org, trusted orgs, and guests People in my org and guests People in my org People who were invited Only organizers and co-organizers
Organizer and co-organizers Bypass Bypass Bypass Bypass Bypass Bypass
People in your organization Bypass Bypass Bypass Bypass People who were sent or forwarded an invite bypass; others wait in the lobby Lobby
Guests Bypass Bypass Bypass Lobby People who were sent or forwarded an invite bypass; others wait in the lobby Lobby
People in trusted organizations Bypass Bypass Lobby Lobby People who were sent or forwarded an invite bypass; others wait in the lobby Lobby
Anonymous participants Bypass Lobby Lobby Lobby People signed in to nontrusted organizations in external access bypass the lobby; others wait in the lobby. Lobby

Only people who were invited applies only to participants who were sent an invite directly, who are part of an invited distribution list (of up to 10,000 users), or to whom an invite was forwarded. Users added via Invite members in a channel meeting wait in the lobby.

Choose who can bypass the lobby in meetings hosted by your organization

You can manage lobby settings and policies in the Teams admin center. See the following sections for guidance on which setting to choose for different circumstances. For information about how meeting policies work, see Manage meeting policies in Microsoft Teams.

Important

Meeting organizers can change the default values that you choose for the People dialing in can bypass the lobby and Who can bypass the lobby settings via Meeting Options. If you need to enforce these settings to a particular value, you can use a meeting template or sensitivity label (Teams Premium required). For more information, see Configure the Microsoft Teams meeting lobby for sensitive meetings.

To manage meeting join and lobby policies, follow these steps:

  1. In the Teams admin center, expand Meetings and then select Meeting policies.

  2. Select the policy that you want to update.

  3. In the Meeting join & lobby sections, update the settings that you want to change:

    • Anonymous users can join a meeting
    • Anonymous users and dial-in callers can start a meeting
    • Who can bypass the lobby (Who can bypass the lobby)
    • People dialing in can bypass the lobby

    Screenshot showing the meeting join and lobby policy in the Teams admin center.

  4. Select Save.

Changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect.

If you want to allow anonymous meeting access, be sure the Anonymous users can join a meeting meeting setting is also turned on.

To set the organization-wide meeting setting for anonymous meeting join

  1. In the Teams admin center, expand Meetings and then select Meeting settings.
  2. In the Participants section, set Anonymous users can join a meeting to On or Off. Screenshot showing the meeting join and lobby settings in the Teams admin center.
  3. Select Save.

Control access to meetings by anonymous participants

Anonymous participants are anonymous because they're not logged in to an account that can be verified. Users considered to be anonymous could include:

  • People who aren't logged in to Microsoft 365 with a work or school account
  • People from nontrusted organizations (as configured in external access).
  • People from organizations that you trust but that don't trust your organization

If you want to prevent anonymous participants from joining meetings completely, you can turn off the Anonymous users can join a meeting organization-wide meeting setting. You can also disable anonymous join for specific meeting organizers by keeping the org-wide setting enabled and using the Anonymous users can join a meeting meeting policy.

If you want people joining anonymously to wait in the lobby, you can set the Who can bypass the lobby meeting policy to any setting except Everyone. (This setting doesn't affect people dialing in by phone.)

By default, the Anonymous users and dial-in callers can start a meeting policy is Off. This means that anonymous participants and people calling in by phone always wait in the lobby until a verified participant starts the meeting.

Important

We recommend that you leave this setting off. When the setting is on, people with unverified accounts can start meetings, including using the meeting link to have meetings at unscheduled times.

Control access to meetings by people dialing in by phone

By default, the People dialing in can bypass the lobby policy is Off, but meeting organizers can change this in Meeting Options when they set up a meeting. You can change the default by updating the People dialing in can bypass the lobby policy or you can enforce a particular value by using a meeting template.

Control access to meetings by guests and people from trusted organizations

There are two types of people outside your organization who can join meetings as verified participants:

If you want all verified meeting participants from outside your organization to wait in the lobby, you can set the Who can bypass the lobby policy to People in my org or Only organizers and co-organizers (as long as a guest isn't the organizer or co-organizer). If you want only people from trusted organizations (external access users) to wait in the lobby, you can choose People in my org and guests.

Control access to meetings by people without invitations

If you want to allow only people who have invitations to join meetings directly and have all other participants wait in the lobby, set Who can bypass the lobby to People who were invited. (People invited via a distribution list of up to 10,000 users are included.)

The People who were invited setting includes all participants with a work or school account and guests to whom the invite was forwarded, not just participants the organizer invited directly. This includes participants from blocked organizations in external access if anonymous meeting join is enabled. It doesn’t include people who have the meeting join link but not the invitation itself and participants who aren't signed in. They must wait in the lobby.

Meeting organizers can disable forwarding the meeting invite if they only want people directly invited by them to attend the meeting.

Control access to meetings by non-organizers

For meetings with sensitive or regulated information, have all participants wait in the lobby until an organizer or co-organizer admits them. In this case, you can set Who can bypass the lobby to Only organizers and co-organizers.

Since Who can bypass the lobby only sets a default that meeting organizers can change, consider enforcing the value with a sensitivity label or meeting template if you have compliance requirements in this area. For more information, see Configure the Microsoft Teams meeting lobby for sensitive meetings.

Turn off the lobby

While there isn't a specific control that turns off the meeting lobby completely, you can effectively disable the meeting lobby by using a combination of settings:

  • Set Who can bypass the lobby to Everyone.
  • Set People dialing in can bypass the lobby to On.

With these settings, anonymous users and dial-in callers still wait in the lobby if the meeting hasn't started. While you can set Anonymous users and dial-in callers can start a meeting to On to avoid this, we don't recommend it.

Set meeting policies by using PowerShell

You can set the meeting policies described in this article by using the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy PowerShell cmdlet with the following parameters:

Run the lobby diagnostic tool

If a user recently had an undesired lobby experience in a meeting hosted by your organization, you can use the lobby diagnostic tool to investigate the expected lobby experience. This tool explains the expected lobby experience for a specific user in a specific meeting and provides guidance to make policy changes if the current experience isn't aligned with your configuration. Make sure you're signed into Microsoft 365 as a Teams administrator to access the tool.

Run Tests: Lobby Access