Today's Teams Tips – 11 February 2021

This week we are covering a new feature that is rolling out now – Meeting Chat Moderation.

Meeting organisers can now choose whether to enable or disable the chat function in meetings. You can set your preference before the meeting actually starts, or while it is happening in real time. So if, for example, you need your attendees to pay particular attention to something being presented, you can turn off the chat for a short period of time to prevent distractions.

Chat options

There are three options available:

• Enabled (default) – allows chat at any time
• Disabled – this makes the chat read-only and no one including the meeting organiser can send messages
• In-meeting only – participants can only send messages during the meeting but the organiser can continue to send messages after the meeting ends.

In-meeting only

This last option is particularly useful because it restricts the chat to that specific meeting and stops it from continuing once the meeting has finished. This forces participants to move a conversation into a fresh dedicated space (group chat or channel) and keeps further conversations in-house, which is helpful if the original meeting included external participants.

Accessing meeting chat moderation

Before the meeting starts, the organiser can access the moderation settings by clicking on Meeting options within the meeting calendar details:

This brings up the Meeting options screen and you can see that at the bottom there is now the line Allow meeting chat (with Enabled selected by default). You can change this by clicking the dropdown and selecting either Disabled or In-meeting only.

If disabled from the start, attendees are notified that the chat function is turned off when they click on the chat icon:

Should you decide to change the chat setting at any point during the meeting, you can do this by accessing the ellipsis menu (…) and selecting Meeting options.

This brings up the following screen and at the bottom you can see the option to Allow meeting chat and the three choices of Enabled, Disabled or In-meeting only.

Chat can be turned on/off throughout the meeting as many times as required.

If 'In-meeting only' is selected, once the meeting is finished attendees can no longer add to the meeting chat and will see the message ‘Chat is only available during the meeting’.

The organiser however, can still post to the Chat and these messages can be viewed by all the attendees, they just can’t reply. This is useful if resource links need to be added post meeting.

As mentioned at the beginning, this is a new feature and so the Meeting Options page on the Teams Sharepoint site is still being updated.

If you have any tips for using Teams which have really helped you make the most of the product, please get in touch or post your tip on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #teamstips. For further information about using Teams effectively, please have a look at the Teams SharePoint site. If you are having any specific issues with the set-up of Teams, please contact the IT Services Desk directly who are best placed to help you.
 

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