Enabling Teams Meeting report download capability

Meetings in Teams is one of the most popular functionality that being used by millions across the world. The ability to download reports for meeting attendance would be very useful for meeting organizers to view the attendance of the meeting/s. In the recent Teams update, Microsoft added this functionality to Teams, but it is disabled by default, and you will not be able to use it out-of-the-box unless you enable it (for everyone or a specific target group). This post will guide you to get this done.

Note: There’s a still a limitation to this where you can’t download the report after the meeting ended. You will have to download it while participants are still in the meeting.

Steps:

1. Log in to Teams admin centre meeting policies blade and create a new policy using the ‘+’ sign – https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/policies/meetings

Policy Title – MeetingPolicy_ReportsEnabled

Description – Meeting policy with reports download feature enabled

General

Allow Meet now in channels – On

Allow the Outlook add-in – On

Allow channel meeting scheduling – On

Allow scheduling private meetings – On

Audio Video

Allow transcription – On

Allow cloud recording – On

Mode for IP audio – Outgoing and incoming audio enabled

Mode for IP video – Outgoing and incoming video enabled

Allow IP video – On

Allow NDI streaming – Off

Media bit rate (Kbs) – 50000

Content sharing

Screen sharing mode – Entire Screen

Allow a participant to give or request control – On

Allow an external participant to give or request control – On

Allow PowerPoint sharing – On

Allow whiteboard – On

Allow shared notes – On

Participants and Guests

Let anonymous people start a meeting – off

Roles that have presenter rights in meetings – Everyone, but user can override

Automatically admit people – Everyone

Allow dial-in users to bypass the lobby – On

Allow Meet now in private meetings – On

Enable live captions – Disabled but the user can override

Allow chat in meetings – Enabled

Hit save to apply the changes

1. Then enable the Meeting reports feature, run the following commands in PowerShell (this requires admin access)

$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession

Import-PSSession $sfbSession

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “MeetingPolicy_ReportsEnabled” -AllowEngagementReport Enabled

Use this command to verify the settings. Ensure the AllowEngagementReport parameter value is “Enabled”

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “MeetingPolicy_ReportsEnabled”

1. Finally set this policy to the intended users manually by going to each users Teams profile –> Edit the Meeting Policy for the user –> Change the policy asignment to the new Policy just created (MeetingPolicy_ReportsEnabled) and hit “Save”

During the meeting, you’ll see the following option to download under the “People” section.

Advertisement

Enable Microsoft Whiteboard for Teams

Whiteboard in Teams is powered by Whiteboard for the web and this is a very useful feature for collaborating in group meetings. A shared canvas space allows meeting participants to collaborate. In Office 365, Whiteboard feature is enabled by default unless you disabled it manually (mostly customers disable it due to data residency concerns).

Microsoft Note: The ability to start a new whiteboard is currently limited to the Microsoft Teams clients on Windows 10, macOS, and for the web. The Teams apps for iOS and Android cannot initiate sharing a whiteboard, but they can collaborate once a whiteboard is shared.

Now let’s get this configured. Login to Office 365 Admin center using admin credentials and type ‘Whiteboard’ in the global search field. You will get the Whiteboard global settings option in a search result dropdown.

Check the ‘Turn on’’ tick box to enable it globally in your Tenancy. Diagnostic data collection by Microsoft is disclosed via three options here.

Connected experiences and sharing from Surface Hub are two optional settings depending on the organizational requirements. Finally hit ‘Save’ to complete it.

Now the global setting is enabled, we need to ensure the Whiteboard capability is also enabled in the Meeting policies. If you have multiple policies, make sure this is enabled for all of them to affect it to the desired target audiences.

From the Teams admin center, navigate to Meetings –> Meeting policies

Then click on the desired policy (in my case, the ‘Default’ as it affects to all users)

Toggle the ‘Allow Whiteboard’ switch to ‘On’ state to enable it and hit ‘Save’

Notes: This might take a couple of ours to reflect to all users (in my case it took 7+ hours).

Testing the feature.

1. Now to try this out, you can create a test meeting with another user and ensure the Whiteboard is appearing once ‘Share’ option is clicked.

1. Also, if you login to office.com, you should be able to see the ‘Whiteboard’ App under the Apps list.

Troubleshooting:

If you still don’t see the feature in Teams meetings, try to toggle ‘Off’ the Whiteboard feature from Teams meeting policy. Then turn in it on again and try it in a couple of hours.

Outlook Error: Unable to convert a generic Outlook meeting to a Teams meeting (online meeting)

Article Updated: This issue is now resolved

Due to the popular demand, Microsoft has re-deployed this feature on 14th September 2020. If you restart the Outlook, Teams clients and try to convert a occurrence now, you should be able to do so.

“This is one appointment in a series, To make it an online meeting, open the meeting series and try again”

Did you get this error just out of the blue in Outlook as well ? – If so, this is an ongoing issue with Outlook clients and you are not the only one impacted, and, not everyone impacted either. Recurring meeting in Outlook had the ability to edit one occurrence out of the series and we could convert these generic meetings in to Teams meetings (online meeting) until last week 14-08-2020). However this has somehow changed for some customers probably due to an Outlook/Teams update (not yet confirmed).

In my case, the following version of Outlook 2016 had the issue (and it’s not the only version impacted)

This may not be one of those common features used by majority but, it is indeed an important feature for those who are having busy calendars to manage.

Usually when you try to edit an single occurrence in a series.

It prompts you to choose a one or the entire series. The following steps are captured from my device as it seems not impacted.

The problem starts when you click on “Teams Meeting” icon to convert the meeting to a Teams meeting.

This is how it supposed to look like when it converted. You can simply send the update and the generic meeting will become a “Teams Meeting” and the meeting details will be inserted to the bottom of the screen.

So far I have tried the following but nothing made any difference.

1. Clear Outlook cache and restart Outlook and PC
2. Clear teams cache and restart
3. Disable and enable Teams Add-in for Outlook

Workaround: (this is verified to be working): There is an alternative way of changing meetings using OWA for now. I truly understand this is frustrating but until Microsoft come back to us, perhaps Mary can use this workaround from Outlook Online ? (Web version from https://www.office.com )

Workaround: Outlook on the web is the only workaround as of now. It works well on OWA but if you have shared calendars it may not be the best option. To test it out follow these steps:

From outlook web, go to Calendar tab à from the desired series of events, double click on one of the occurrence in the series

And Edit “This Event”

Go to “More options”

And toggle the “Teams Meeting” switch next to room location

Then Save it. You should be able to see this occurrence has now set to a Teams Meeting.

There are many who impacted as per this forum post and keeps growing. If you are facing the issue as well, just post a comment there  – https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_win10-mso_o365b/cannot-add-teams-meeting-to-a-single-occurrence-of/fbf2db7e-e8b3-443f-bed9-ec1f9dd6ce31?messageId=517049e8-c2c4-4ff9-ae55-1a3e778999a2

I am currently working with a Microsoft support engineer to engage the backend team and will keep this post updated as soon as I have an update. If you have faced it too or have found a fix, please reach out to me on manojviduranga@hotmail.com and share the ideas !!

Update: Due to the popular demand, Microsoft has re-deployed this feature on 14th September 2020. If you restart the Outlook, Teams clients and try to convert a occurrence now, you should be able to do so.