Teams: Settings and Security Defaults

While attending the Microsoft Community Conference, there were a number of sessions about Teams, various setting options, and a wide variety of security offerings. As I took notes, I also reached out to our tech team with these questions. Here’s a summary of what they do and why!

Getting Started

In Teams, we can chat with each other, search, send a screen shot or even a document. When I want to add others, we can create a new ‘Team’ with those members. When a Team is created, an associated SharePoint site is also created.

Some Basic Features

  • Enable Meeting Lobby: When hosting a meeting with external guests, setting up the lobby allows you an opportunity to Admit them into the meeting. This is a great way to make sure only invited and authorized participants can attend. This includes AI note takers who look like another guest—you don’t have to Admit these! For our clients, people in the organization automatically are allowed, and all outside addresses start in the lobby.
  • Manage Meeting Controls: When you’re presenting, you can set yourself as the sole presenter to maintain control. Similarly, you can assign the trainer as the presenter and everyone else as an attendee.
  • Meeting Passwords: This is not on by default. However, there may be times when a meeting is confidential. Use the Meeting options, set a password for the meeting and share it only with those you’ve invited to join. They will be prompted for the password.
  • Meeting Chat: In general, this is enabled and a great way to copy-paste text, email addresses, spelling of names, send a screen shot, and more. However, during a sensitive discussion, you may not want any data shared in the Chat. In the Meeting options, find “Chat” and disable the feature for the participants.
  • Participant Video: For smaller meetings, we encourage, and when possible, require video to help people stay engaged, connected, and to look for any warnings that someone is distraught. However, in a very BIG group meeting, this could be a huge distraction. In the Meeting Options, under “Video” you have the option to turn off participant video which also helps with bandwidth.
  • Screen Sharing: Similar to the Meeting Controls, this allows you to limit those who can share screens. You might want to be the only one to share, or only those designated as presenters.
  • Apply Watermarks: I thought this one was interesting. The request is made to the IT group to enable watermarking for sensitive meetings. This applies the watermark to video feeds and shared screens.

Some Other Things We Have Setup

  • Attendance and Engagement is set to ‘On’
  • Allow Dial in, but cannot bypass the Lobby
  • Chat is enabled by default
  • Everyone can share their screen by default

Copilot Considerations

  • When recording meetings and engaging transcriptions, consider the topic and the type of data that will be shared; is this appropriate?
  • Copilot will honor the person’s Microsoft 365 Security permissions. If you’ve invited them to the meeting, they now have access to the results of this meeting and the content created.

– CMW

MENU