Make external users wait in a lobby before joining Teams meetings

May 5, 2020
|By Serge Tremblay
Tags: anonymous users External users Meetings Microsoft Teams Office 365
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It’s a good practice to make attendees who are external to your organisation wait in a lobby before they can join your Teams meeting.

This prevents situations like having external users joining the meeting without first knowing who they are, and then potentially sharing information with someone you did not intend to.

Setting the ‘wait in lobby’ policy for users outside your organization

To force external users to wait in a lobby your Teams administrator will need to open the Microsoft Teams Admin Center:

  • Click Meetings
  • Click Meeting Policies
  • Choose Global (Org-wide-defaut) policy
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Within the Global (Org-wide default) policy, scroll down to the Participants and Guests section and set the option to automatically admit people to:

  • Everyone in your organization
  • Everyone in your organization

Other useful options include:

  • Everyone or Everyone in your organization and Federated organizations
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This way people from your organization will be able to join without having to wait, while external users will have to wait until the hosts accept them in the meeting.

Note: You might also want to turn off: Allow dial-in users to bypass the lobby

External user waiting to join

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Host admitting a user to the meeting

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You’re all set. Happy meetings!

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