gcd.w3.uvm.eduGeoff @ UVM – Adventures in System Administration

Geoff @ UVM Adventures in System Administration Menu Home About Software License Search for: Posts Turn on caller announcements in Teams meetings Posted on June 1, 2022 by Geoff We have turned off announcements of callers joining or leaving calls by default. These announcements can be very disruptive to larger meetings like classes, workshops, and public events. However, you can enable caller announcements on a per-meeting basis. Open (edit) your meeting in the Teams client and look for the Meeting options link in the menu bar. Depending on the width of your screen, it might be uner an ellipses (…) menu. The meeting options link opens a web page with settings that apply to this meeting. Clicking the Meeting options link will open your web browser to show a list of settings that allows you to customize the meeting to better meet your needs. For example, you might want to limit the ways participants can interact in the meeting, say during a presentation, to reduce disruptions. Most of these options can be changes on the fly during a meeting by the meeting organizer. Among the settings you can change is Announce when callers join or leave . Make sure you click the Save button at the bottom to ensure that any changes you’ve made will apply to your meeting. You can turn on the option to Announce when callers join or leave . Remember that only a meeting organizer — the person who created the meeting — can change these settings. There is a feature coming to allow assignment of co-organizers which will be allow people you identify to manage these settings, among other capabilities. Posts Manage Teams meeting transcripts Posted on December 7, 2021 by Geoff I received a question from a client who wanted both to use the live transcript capability of a Teams meeting, but also to delete the transcript from the meeting after saving it. Microsoft added the Live Transcription capability to Teams meetings, and is expanding it to 1:1 calls and channel meetings. The transcript can be viewed live during the meeting, as well as when the meeting is over (or the transcription is stopped). Meeting participants will see a summary card in the meeting chat that allows them to view and/or download the transcript. In addition, the meeting organizer* can delete the transcript. The ellipses (three dots) menu provides options to download or delete the transcript. Similar options also are available within the meeting item itself in the Teams calendar, where a RecordingTranscripts tab is available. The transcript can also be managed from the meeting item in the Teams calendar. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose would be for removing (but also saving) a meeting transcript. Removing the transcript doesn’t prevent someone from generating a transcript using some other, external application, or typing their own notes. Attendees also have the ability to download the transcript file until the organizer deletes it, which set up a bit of a race condition.” That said, the functionality in Microsoft Teams does support this workflow. * As with meeting recordings, it is possible for someone other than the organizer to start transcription (depending on the meeting settings). Documentation indicates the transcript permissions follow the model of the meeting recording, where both the meeting organizer and the person who started transcription should be able to delete the transcript. Posts Capturing MS Whiteboard in Teams meeting recording Posted on October 4, 2021 by Geoff In September, Microsoft launched a new and much improved Whiteboard web app , which includes basic features like being able to add an image and reactions, but also advanced options like templates for various activities. The new whiteboard within a Teams meeting, desktop and mobile versions. This new functionality is available from within Microsoft Teams meetings as well as via a web browser. The Windows and iOS native apps will be updated to use this new service in the coming month. The new Whitebaord app works well, especially with a pen or stylus enabled device. One particularly irksome issue remains which dogged the previous incarnation of MS Whiteboard; meeting recordings don’t capture whiteboard content when the whiteboard is shared within the Teams meeting window. There is a small warning when you first share a whiteboard while recording a meeting: To work around this issue, you can open your whiteboard with a web browser at https://whiteboard.microsoft.com and then share your screen . Then the whiteboard is captured in the meeting recording just like any other shared desktop app content. This approach also provides the benefit of setting up your whiteboard ahead of time, whereas sharing a whiteboard in a meeting from within Teams creates a new whiteboard for that meeting. Step by step The following procedure can be followed prior to your meeting or you can do the required steps on the fly to quickly create and share a new whiteboard. Required : In your web browser, go to https://whiteboard.microsoft.com . Click the blue plus” button/tile labeled Create new Whiteboard . If you are just planning on using the Whiteboard to deliver content, and don’t want the participants interacting with the content, stop here. You can now share your browser window or desktop into your Teams meeting and the participants will see the whiteboard contents as you work. If you want to have an interactive Whiteboard session, then you need to create and share a link to the whiteboard. As you might expect, this will give those with the link the ability to edit the contents of the whiteboard. Click the Share button in the upper right of the screen. A Share windows slides in from the right with the sole option to create a sharing link to let other people access the whiteboard. Click the button to enable the share link. Before enabling the share link. And after. Note that you can turn off the sharing link later. Copy the share link and then paste this link into the meeting chat or share the link some other way with the people you want to collaborate on this whiteboard’s content. Once you’ve opened your whiteboard in your browser window, you can share it within a Microsoft Teams meeting by sharing your whole screen or just the browser app window . Don’t select the whiteboard sharing option here ; this will create a new whiteboard and it won’t be captured in the meeting recording, which is the whole point of this work-around. You can follow step one though three ahead of a meeting and add any content that you want in preparation, perhaps using one of the templates for Brainstorming or reflecting on a project or class discussion. You may also find it useful to name your whiteboards to make them easier to find later. You can also format the background with grids or colors and add images . After your whiteboard session is over, you can export a whiteboard as a PNG image, and you can turn off the sharing link to preserve its state Posts Embedding a Microsoft Form Posted on August 11, 2021 by Geoff Adding a Microsoft form by editing the HTML directly: Posts Problems accessing Teams recordings Posted on May 5, 2021 by Geoff We’ve been seeing problems where students have trouble accessing the recordings for a class meeting even when the permissions on that recording indicate that a Microsoft unified group of which the students are members have viewing rights. Error message: Hmm … it seems you don’t have access. The Microsoft Stream Classic service appears to create a local cached copy of the group at the time of the recording, and this group appears not to get updated in a reliable fashion. This means that if a recording is made when a student is not yet a member of the class team, they may not be able to view a video. Continue reading → Posts Can’t change meeting organizer Posted on April 14, 2021 by Geoff There’s no way to modify or update the organizer of an existing Microsoft Outlook or Teams meeting. The organizer is the...