We are thrilled to announce a new feature in Microsoft Teams that enhances the security and trustworthiness of your meetings through email verification for external participants joining Meetings. Meeting organizers can now require external participants to verify their email addresses with a verification code before joining the meeting. Once verified, participants will appear in the meeting with the ‘Email verified’ label, offering a more reliable way for organizers to manage external participants. This enhancement gives organizers greater confidence about who is joining their meetings.
Who is this functionality intended for?
When inviting an external participant to join Teams meetings, it is common that the participant may not have a Microsoft work, school, or personal account for sign-in. Currently, Teams supports users joining meetings as ‘unverified’ participants. If your organization does not want unverified participants to be able to join meetings , you will benefit from a new capability that allows for participants to join the meeting by verifying their email without signing up for a Teams account. This enables an organizer to verify all participants and provides the ability to track those who join your meetings after verifying their email addresses.
How can your organization enable this?
This capability is available to meeting organizers with a Teams Premium license.
Admin controls: Admins managing tenant policies will have a new meeting policy labeled ‘Anonymous users can join Teams meetings after verifying by email code’ as shown in the screenshot below. This new meeting policy complements the existing meeting policy where tenant admins already have the control to enable ‘anonymous users to join the meeting unverified’.
When admins can choose to turn on both the meeting policies for the users in the organizations, and leave the choice of requiring email verification to the meeting organizers via a new meeting option that will be available for them.
Meeting Organizer Controls: When scheduling meetings, meeting organizers will now have a new meeting option labelled ‘Unverified participants can join the meeting’ that will be set to default on for the cases where the admin had enabled unverified joins as shown in the screen below:
Organizers can choose to require participants to verify themselves by turning off this meeting option as shown in the screenshot below:
Participant Experience: When organizers choose to disallow unverified participants from joining meetings, participants will be required to authenticate themselves upon attempting to join the meeting. If they possess a work account, school account, or personal Microsoft account, they can use these credentials for authentication. Participants without any of these Microsoft accounts will need to verify by entering their email address, which will receive a one-time passcode for verification.
Participants who verify the same email address that the meeting invitation was sent to will be allowed to join the meeting directly if the ‘lobby bypass’ setting permits invited participants. Conversely, participants verifying with a different email address will be placed in the lobby and labeled as ‘Email verified’.
Based on the ‘Lobby Bypass’ settings, if the setting is set to allow invited participants to bypass the lobby, then email verified participants that were invited for the meeting will be allowed to bypass the lobby. For email verified participants that were not invited for the meeting, they will be placed in the lobby. The ‘email verified’ tag and the email address they entered for verification will be shown on the profile card of the participant in the lobby, meeting roster, and meeting chat.
Why should your organization use this feature?
Enhanced security and trust: By verifying the identity of external attendees, we reduce the risk of unauthorized access to meetings. Meeting organizers can trust external participants more as they now have the email address of the participants, which is not feasible for unverified joins.
Improved engagement: Organizers can gather additional attendee information for follow-up and engagement, which can improve overall meeting effectiveness.
Availability
This feature will be available as part of Teams Premium and will be released for public preview in early 2025. Organizations can enhance the security and user experience for external participants joining Microsoft Teams Meetings. Stay tuned for more updates and detailed documentation on how to enable and use email verification for external participants in Teams Meetings.
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