Microsoft Teams will soon let you lock meetings

Source: Dan Thorp-Lancaster / Windows Central

Microsoft Teams will soon allow people on desktops to lock their meetings. Once the feature rolls out, meeting organizers will be able to prevent people from attempting to join a meeting. The feature appears on the Microsoft 365 roadmap and could arrive as soon as May 2021, though dates on the roadmap are always subject to change.

Microsoft Teams already allows organizers to decide who can enter a meeting, but people could potentially see several requests to join a meeting once it’s started. An organizer could turn these down, of course, but that requires action on the part of the organizer. Having to do this could be distracting and irritating. By being able to lock a meeting, an organizer can just stop requests altogether.

Here’s the description from the Microsoft 365 roadmap:

In the Teams meetings desktop app experience, organizers can choose to lock their meetings to prevent subsequent join attempts. Anyone attempting to join a lock meeting from any device will be informed that the meeting is locked.

In addition to making things a bit easier for meeting organizers, the feature can also help meeting organizers know who is within a meeting. Once you have dozens of participants in a meeting, it can be difficult to keep track of who joins. This upcoming feature will make it easy to lock a meeting once all the desired participants arrive.