Configuring Your Meeting Options

Created by Faye for Freshworks, Modified on Fri, 30 Jan at 11:00 AM by Faye for Freshworks

In this article:

Meeting Types
- Selecting Your Meeting Type
User Roles
Green Rooms
Recording the Meeting
Enabling Q&A
Questions from the Audience
Sending the Invitations to Attendees

Starting a meeting without the proper settings toggled could be embarrassing and disastrous. Before launching your meeting, make sure you're setting the meeting up properly by double and triple checking the items below.

Meeting Types

As a quick reminder, there are three meeting types.

Standard meeting - Holds up to 1,000 attendees (or 10,000 in view-only mode). Best for collaboration and interactivity.
Webinar - Holds up to 1,000 attendees. No breakout rooms or view-only participants. Users can share content. Designed for group presentations.
Town Hall - Holds up to 10,000 participants. No lobby or breakout rooms, attendees mics and video feeds are disabled. Content sharing is limited to Q&A only. Designed for large company-wide presentations.

Selecting Your Meeting Type

Now that you understand the meeting types, it's time to choose the type of meeting you want. Navigate to Teams, and go to the Calendar. You'll see a dropdown menu. Click the arrow, and you'll be able to set up a meeting of your preferred type.

User Roles

When hosting a large event, you need to determine who your co-organizers and presenters will be. You'll learn how to set your co-organizers and presenters for the meeting in the Green Room section. Each role has different abilities.

You can choose the co-presenters when setting up the Green Room.

External attendees outside of your organization that are invited to the presentation cannot be set as Co-Organizers or Presenters.

Green Rooms

Do you and your remote presenters like to connect right before your meetings start to gameplan? Do you join your meetings a few minutes early to discuss who will present first/second/third, but find participants start joining and observing you? A Green Room is the solution.

Attendees who join while the Green Room is open will fall into the Waiting Room. They won't see or hear the presenters in the Green Room and won't be able to enable their cameras or mics. But they can chat!

The Green Room must be toggled before the meeting starts. The organizer, co-organizers, and presenters will automatically join the Green Room when joining the meeting. It's important to note that the Green Room's capacity is limited to 100 users. To enable the Green Room, you must first choose your co-organizers and who can present. Once the meeting is set up, those co-organizers and presenters will enter the Green Room instead of the lobby.

Meeting Options.png
Once this is done, you'll be able to toggle the Green Room.

The only common element between the presenters in the Green Room and the attendees in the Waiting Room is the chat. Presenters can see if attendees are getting chatting excitedly with each other or getting impatient. The organizer can send a chat message from the Green Room telling all attendees the meeting will start in a few minutes. Be aware that if presenters in the Green Room want to chat with each other, this will not be private from attendees in the Waiting Room. It's one chat for all to share.

When you're ready to begin the meeting, your Support Center technician or anyone in the Green Room can press the Start Meeting button at the upper right. This permanently closes the Green Room and the Waiting Room, combining both together into the familiar meeting experience.

We recommend asking your presenters to join early enough that they can complete their discussions in the Green Room at least 5 minutes before the scheduled start time of the meeting. This way only attendees joining more than 5 minutes early will need to wait in the Waiting Room and you can welcome everyone with some enjoyable music to set the mood. The Waiting Room does not allow customization, screensharing, or music, so you'll want to avoid keeping participants in the Waiting Room after the scheduled start time if at all possible.

Once you close the Green Room and begin the meeting, there's no going back into the Green Room. The show must go on!

Although you can invite anyone outside Encore to join a Teams meeting, Encore's corporate security settings will not allow external presenters to join a Green Room. This cannot be adjusted in Meeting Options.

Recording the Meeting

There's an extremely important option that we want to make sure you notice, and that's the option to record the meeting automatically. While it sounds convenient, this is one option that we want to double, triple, and quadruple check is turned off. The reason for this is because if it's enabled, it assigns the recording to the first person that enters the meeting, and as you can imagine, it makes sharing the recordings a nightmare. Just make sure to start recording once the meeting begins.

This is so important that we're going to stress it again. Make sure that record automatically is toggled OFF prior to starting the meeting.

Enabling Q&A

While there are multiple types of Q&A sessions you can have for your meeting, you won't be able to utilize any of them without enabling the option. Prior to the start of the meeting:

Select More Actions at the top of the Teams meeting window
Select Meeting Options
Make sure to toggle Q&A

Questions from the Audience

Interacting with colleagues in a Teams meeting is foundational, but how can you manage interactions with hundreds of participants at once?

Live Spoken Questions

Support Center generally recommends restricting attendee microphones to eliminate distracting noise during presentations, but if you want to take spoken questions at a set time, your operator can enable the microphones of specific attendees. Asking the group to use the Raise Hand feature helps identify people with questions to our technician in first come first serve order.

Chat

The chat of a Teams meeting is a familiar place for attendees to share comments and reactions. For audiences who may be hesitant to engage, it may feel like the most natural and comfortable way to share questions with the presenter. Alternatively, if your large audience is confident and lively, chat messages may come streaming in faster than you can address them live. Some questions may be repeated if the initial ask is too far back in the chat to be seen on screen.

Q&A

If you need a more structured way to take questions from your audience, you can enable the Teams Q&A feature prior to the start of the meeting. Questions are presented in a larger block display and subsequent comments stay attached to the relevant question. The organizer and presenters can also pin a question to feature it or close a question that's been answered live to keep things moving along.

Support Center generally does not recommend having BOTH chat and Q&A in the same meeting. This will split the audience's focus with some preferring to submit questions via Q&A while others gravitate towards chat, leading to duplication and missed details.

Moderated Q&A

For further control of extra sensitive Q&A you can enable moderation. Questions are submitted in the same way, but the audience will only see the ones you approve. This can be helpful weeding out joke questions or unconstructive comments, but does require some planning and support from experts on the subject matter you're presenting.

Sending the Invitations to Attendees

When it's time to invite attendees to the list, you may find yourself stressed out. After all, who wants to send hundreds, if not thousands, individual invitations? Fortunately, Teams supports distribution lists. You can create distribution lists inside of Outlook and invite them via Teams. This is recommended so you don't leave anyone out or don't mistype an email address.

Responses Optional

As you can imagine, bulk sending thousands of invitations could cause a headache when people start accepting or declining the invitation. Fortunately, Teams has a setting for that.

When setting up your meeting, at the top, click "Response Options". You'll see two options:

Request Responses - If you don't want your inbox being crammed full of notifications, make sure this item is unchecked.
Allow forwarding - We recommend that this one also be unchecked. This option allows attendees to forward invitations to anyone they choose, and any follow-ups to the meeting will also cc that person. As you can imagine, this scenario could cause a nightmare, especially if you're discussing sensitive company matters and an attendee forwarded the invitation to someone outside of your organization without your knowledge.