1. Configuring Meeting Settings
I would now like to take a look at our meeting settings in teams. To begin, we are on the Microsoft.com portal, also known as Admin dot Microsoft.com. We’ll go ahead and select the Teams Admin Center. Again, if it doesn’t show up, just click the show all lips symbol, and you should be able to find it. Okay, so we’re jumping into the team admin centre here. All right, we’re going to click the meetings drop-down menu, and we’re going to click on “Meetings Settings” or “Meeting Settings.” Okay, so your meeting settings are where you’re going to control the settings that will involve a meeting that’s been called or scheduled by a user. And you’re going to have different participants in the meeting, and you can control some of the flow of traffic on it and how all that gets managed on your network, and you can control who can join the meeting and all of that stuff.
Now the first setting that you’re going to notice here is participants, and right there it says anonymous users can join a meeting. So anonymous users are going to be people who are able to join without authenticating. This is going to involve people who are doing a phone bridge. This is going to involve somebody clicking through the app who hasn’t actually authenticated. That’s what that is. Now, if you want to disable that, you can disable that, and then people will have to authenticate in order to join the meeting. Below that, you have email invitations. Now email invitations get sent out, and what they’re going to do is allow you to sort of customise the invitation itself here, and then from there you can put a logo in it so that your logo shows up in the invitation. a legal URL that people can read like a legal notice.
You can have a help URL that has some help information, and of course, you can put a footer there as well. So those are some of the things you can do. You can click on “preview invitation” too, and you can see what this would look like. Obviously, I haven’t added any kind of logo or any of that stuff, so I’ve just got the basic template here. But this is something you can play around with, and you can sort of modify it the way you want. Now below that is the network setting, and on the network settings, you can control the flow of network traffic that’s going to be flowing through in order to handle this meeting. And there are three main things here. We have audio, we have video, and we have screen sharing. It’s going to flow across the network.
Now, most importantly, when it comes to network traffic, we have something called quality of service. Now, depending on how familiar you are with networking, you may know that “quality of service” is a feature that allows our network administration to control the amount of network bandwidth and the prioritisation that happens. So if you’ve got equipment—your routers or switches—that are going to manage the high priority or prioritisation of your network traffic, you’re definitely going to want to turn that on. That’s going to insert QoS tags as well as actually enable something known as DSCP tags, which are the differentiated service code points. This is something that allows for the classification of traffic. Again, not to necessarily turn this into a networking one-on-one class here, but this is all part of network administration. If you’re familiar with it, you might have scenarios where traffic needs to be controlled because certain things are going on in your network.
You don’t want your meetings to suck up all your bandwidth, or maybe you do. You need meetings to have a higher priority for bandwidth. You definitely don’t want real-time traffic to get to people’s machines and flow smoothly and end up with skipping happening in your video or maybe delays or things like that. One thing you can do here is set your port ranges. Now, by default, these are going to be your port ranges that are used there that are being utilised for audio, video, and screen sharing. You can set a starting point and an ending point, and it will essentially utilise those port ranges for this traffic flow. Now if you choose to go to automatic, it’s going to actually use all the dynamic ports. If you’re familiar with that, you may know that that’s 1024 to 65,535. So that’s going to use all those ports, and it’s not really going to give you a lot of control over what ports are going to be used for the bandwidth of audio, video, screen sharing, and all that.
So keep that in consideration. But you can also adjust this any way you want. You also have to make sure that if you are using these ports, your network equipment is in the loop on all that. In other words, you have to configure your equipment so that it knows those are the ports that you’re utilising for this traffic. You want to make sure you’re not using those ports for any other type of traffic. Okay, that’s how you’re going to control the quality of service, the high priority of your traffic, and exactly what ports are going to flow through your network. And those are the various meeting settings that you can use in groups.
2. Create and Manage Meeting Policies
This is me testing my voice. Let’s take a look now at our meeting policies and teams. So we’re starting from the beginning here. We’re on admin microsoft.com.also known as Portal Microsoft.com. We’ll go into the Teams admin center. Now once we get into the Teams Admin Center, we’re going to click the little drop-down menu here that says Meetings, and then we’re going to click on Meeting Policies. Okay? So the purpose of a meeting policy is to control certain features that are going to be available to your users whenever they join a team meeting.
Okay? We already have certain policies that have been implemented. For example, we have a global Organization-wide Default Policy that states that anyone who is a member of one of your teams is automatically added to that team. So that’s an example of this. Now you can edit your global default policies by clicking on them. You’ll also notice you have some other policies here: all on, you can restrict anonymous access, and you can have everything off, which turns everything off. You have Restrict Anonymous, no recording, and a kiosk mode that you can use. But first, I’m going to click on the wide default here and take a look at some of the different options that we have. So first off, we have general.
We have some general features here that can be toggled on and off. First and foremost, we can say that they should meet. Now in channels, some of these are for pre-meeting settings. So, for example, when there’s a meeting that’s been scheduled, somebody can meet in a channel and they can chat back and forth before the meeting starts, and that’s going to involve your meat. Now that you’ve enabled the Outlook add-in in the channel, a little add-on will appear in the user’s Outlook that they can click on to join the meeting. You haven’t allowed channel meetings or schedule scheduling. This means during a meeting, you have a channel. You can schedule meetings from within that channel if you want to allow people to schedule meetings from within that channel for a future meeting. And then below that, you have been allowed to schedule a private meeting. This allows people to schedule private meetings if they want, like a one-on-one meeting or something; you can turn that off if you want as well. Below that, you have audio and video that allow transcription. This is going to be a transcription of meeting information.
To enable it, select Allow club recording from the menu. This is going to be used to basically stream and support cloud reporting or recording. You have IP audio mode enabled. So this will control the entire voice over IP setup. Outgoing, incoming, and audio enabled So right now we’re supporting our outgoing and incoming students. If you want to disable that, you can. So if you’re getting into a situation where perhaps you’re not going to allow IP audio or IP video, This is all bridge-based and public switch telephone network-based. You can also say “allow IP video.” You can turn that off if you want. Simply turn off allowIP video display completely. And then you can control the bit rate for this. Also, if you want to try to conserve bandwidth, they’ll actually let you do that. They have a nice little description here. They tell you this is going to basically set the bit rate for your audio. And if you’re really concerned about bandwidth, then you can control that. And I also kind of warn you here that the minimum value is 30 kbps, or kilobits per second. And you want to understand that your quality is going to drop if you go too low on that, right?
So that’s where they’re going with that. Below that, you’ve got content sharing. So you can allow screen sharing. People can use their entire screen. They can share only one application. Or if you don’t want content sharing at all, you can simply turn it off, right? You can allow participants to request control of the screen. You can allow external participants to make requests; that’s somebody who’s not part of our organization. You can allow PowerPoint sharing and whiteboarding; they can share notes. These are all things you can just toggle on and off if you want. And then the last thing we’ve got here are some of our settings involving guests. So again, I can let anonymous people start a meeting if I want. That gets back to your anonymous people. People who have not authenticated, maybe it’s a phone bridge, haven’t authenticated, or they’re using the app and haven’t authenticated.
Automatically admit people; everyone from the organisation automatically gets submitted if we have that set. I can say everyone in the organization, or I can say everyone in your organisation and federated organizations; that’s a trusted automatically getsAllow dial-in users to bypass the lobby so they don’t have to go through the little waiting lobby there. Allow me. Now, in private meetings, again, somebody wants to be able to communicate in a private meeting via a channel before the meeting. They can; you can enable live captions for participants and guests or disable it. disabled, but the user can override if they want to turn it on. Or you can just disable it altogether and then allow chat messages.
So you can allow chatting back and forth in the meeting messages, basically. So they can chat back and forth during the meeting if you want. Or you can disable that so they’re not allowed to chat back and forth while the meeting is going on. Okay, this was for the global, but you could make a new one. So if I wanted to, I could call this sales meeting policy, right? Turn off everything I want, click Save once I’ve got it the way I want it, and then right after you’ve done that, you’ve got this option here that says Manage Users. So you’re going to click Manage Users, and you can then associate this so I can add users that I want to add to the associated list to whoever I want, and basically specify anybody that I want to be a part of this.
3. Configuring Settings for Live Events
I want to look at some of the live event settings that we have in Teams. So we’re basically starting from scratch. Here we are on portal Microsoft.com. We’ll go to the Teams admin console. Alright? And once we get into the Teams Admin Center, we’re going to drop down where it says Meetings, and we’re going to go into live event settings, okay? In terms of live events, there isn’t much to control here. You have a support URL; perhaps you could create a SharePoint support site.
Somebody’s having some problems getting into a live event; they’ll go to the support site that Microsoft provides, but you could create a site in SharePoint or something and change this URL to point to that. The other option that you’ve got, if you’re doing a large video stream and you’re trying to get really good bandwidth for your users and keep out delays, is to use a third-party video distribution provider. So if you select that and turn it on, you’ve got a software-defined network provider that you can select here. And there are two options that your software-defined network providers are going to provide. You’ve got the “hive,” and you’ve got the “collective.” Now, generally speaking, HIV is usually considered better. It can be a little bit more expensive.
One of the big things you get with Hive is multiple large streams, usually a bare minimum of three video streams that are being fed out to your users. So if they lose one videostream, they’ve got another video stream. Collective is only sending one powerful stream out, so it’s not as resilient as Hive. So, most people agree that Hive will be a better solution than one of your providers. You can look up the different third-party providers for this as well, and that’s how you would sign up. If you select Hive, you will be given a licence key as well as an SDK API Template URL, which you will enter and then save. Okay? As far as Collective goes, it’s along the same lines, but you’ll get an SDN Provider API token that you’ll put in, and then the SDN API Template URL would go here. One other thing I’d like to point out If you click the little link that they provide up here where it says “Learn more,” you get to a Knowledge Base article, and you can also control this through PowerShell.
So there’s a nice little command here. Schedule a CS team meeting. Broadcast configuration. You can even click the link here, and it will take you to the PowerShell article or the Knowledge Base article on the PowerShell command. And of course, they go through each one of the switches with you, showing you what each one of the switches can do. So, if you wanted to change those settings or write a script, you could do so with PowerShell. You just have to make sure you’re connected to teams, which we’ve gone through before. So those are your live event settings. Again, not too much TV to worry about there. Just understand that you have a third-party distribution provider you can use.
4. Create and Manage Policies for Live Events
This is me testing my voice. I’m going to now jump in and take a look at some of our live event policies that we can configure as a team. So we’re starting out here on portal dot Microsoft.com. We’re going to go into the team’s admin center, alright, so opening that up, we’re going to look to the left and drop down where it says Meetings, and we’re going to click on where it says Live Event Policies.
All right, so once you get into live event policies, this is where you can control some of the different features being turned on or turned off, who can join a live event, all of that stuff. Now you have a default policy, here called the global default. You can click on that, and you can see there are just a few options here that you’ve got. So first off, you’ve got to allow scheduling that allows people to schedule these live events. You can say “allow transcription for attendees.” You can turn that on or off, so this will allow transcriptions to occur. You can also say who can schedule the events. Right now, everyone in my organisation can schedule an event. Everyone, in my opinion. This will include guests and all that. You can say everyone in the company. Or you can specify specific users and groups for whom you want to do this. Finally, there is someone who can record an event.
As a result, I can say, “always record the event, never record it.” The event organiser can record, so you can specify that, and it can go out to streams and all that with Microsoft. So if you want the event to be recorded, that will be available to your users. Okay, now this is the global policy. I can create a specific policy if I want. Name it what I want again—name it sales, liveevents if you want, and specify the settings; then click Save. And then, of course, all you’ve got to do is go right over here to manage users, and you can specify who you want to associate this with.
5. Configuring Conference Bridge Settings
This is me testing my voice. I’m going to now jump in and take a look at some of our live event policies that we can configure as a team. So we’re starting out here on portal dot Microsoft.com. We’re going to go into the team’s admin center, alright, so opening that up, we’re going to look to the left and drop down where it says Meetings, and we’re going to click on where it says Live Event Policies. All right, so once you get into live event policies, this is where you can control some of the different features being turned on or turned off, who can join a live event, all of that stuff.
Now you have a default policy, here called the global default. You can click on that, and you can see there are just a few options here that you’ve got. So first off, you’ve got to allow scheduling that allows people to schedule these live events. You can say “allow transcription for attendees.” You can turn that on or off, so this will allow transcriptions to occur. You can also say who can schedule the events. Right now, everyone in my organisation can schedule an event. Everyone, in my opinion.
This will include guests and all that. You can say everyone in the company. Or you can specify specific users and groups for whom you want to do this. Finally, there is someone who can record an event. As a result, I can say, “always record the event, never record it.” The event organiser can record, so you can specify that, and it can go out to streams and all that with Microsoft. So if you want the event to be recorded, that will be available to your users. Okay, now this is the global policy. I can create a specific policy if I want. Name it what I want again—name it sales, liveevents if you want, and specify the settings; then click Save. And then, of course, all you’ve got to do is go right over here to manage users, and you can specify who you want to associate this with.
