Hello Readers, I hope you’re well.

This is a quick post on a relatively new feature in Teams. The ability to End a meeting. Before you stop reading, I’ll add that I wrote this simply to document the behavior as it is now. And hope that the future brings some improvements.

Background

Before Microsoft added the ability to End a meeting, the organizer could only leave a meeting or basically hang up. This didn’t end the meeting and meant that attendees could stay in the meeting forever maybe. This is, of course, promlematic for a number of reasons. Not least of which because the attendees can keep talking and using chat. But if an organizer starts recording and doesn’t stop recording before leaving the meeting, recording continues until the last person leaves.

Ending a meeting immediately kicks all attendees out and stops the recording. However, until very recently, attendees could simply rejoin the meeting and start it back up again.

Microsoft improved upon this useful feature by making sure all external attendees get taken to the lobby and need to be admitted.

How to do it

Firstly, make sure you have the lobby turned on for your meetings to avoid other problems. I would alwasy set meeting options to only allow people in your my org to bypass the lobby as a minimum.

This way, when your attendees join, you’ll get a notification when they join and another when they are waiting in the lobby.

To end a meeting, hit the more options button and end meeting

Then confirm

This kicks attendees out. But as you can see, there is still a rejoin button

This is where the improvement kicks in. You as the organizer will still get a toast that someone joined the meeting.

You can ignore this and hope they go away. Or you can join it

And deny entry

The attendee will see a message that they were denied entry and hopefully go away.

The behaviour is less the same in the browser and in the Teams client while signed out. However there is one scenario that is different. I found this when I tested join in the Teams desktop client while signed in. The account I was signed in with wasn’t invited to the meeting. I just used the join URL and told it to open the Teams cleint.

I was still kicked out when the host ended the meeting, and I had a rejoin button. The crucial difference is that I could continue the chat.

Wrap up

I think there could still be use cases where chat after a meeting has ended would be useful. To ask a follow up question for instance. And there’s definitely a use case for meetings that can be restarted. However, I also see a need for the ability to completely end a meeting so it can’t be rejoined and so that chat can’t continue.

Ending a meeting in this way is a great start. But I definitely think there’s room for improvement.

Would love to hear your thoughts.