When Someone Exits the Organization, They Might Leave Active Teams Online Meetings Behind

Last week, I discussed the issue of handling the information contained in Teams chats participated in by an ex-employee. Another common problem that emerges when someone leaves is how to handle meetings organized by the leaver. For instance, I received a note to ask:

“We have an important Teams meeting. The organizer of that meeting has left. There are co-organizers, so the meeting chat and recordings can be retained. One problem is that the “missed activity emails” from Teams are sent in the name of the original organizer. Is it possible to change these to be sent by a co-organizer or change the meeting’s “owner” (which would hopefully change the sender of these mails). The issue is bothersome because some of the recipients of these mails are senior leadership, and they ask why the messages come from an ex-employee.”

I’m assuming that this refers to a personal meeting. In other words, someone created a recurring meeting in their calendar (Outlook or Teams) and invited a bunch of people to attend rather than creating a channel meeting.

Creating a Teams Online Meeting

When someone creates an online Teams meeting, two things happen. First, an online meeting is created for participants to come together and share audio and video feeds. This object is controlled by Teams and is an instance of the onlineMeeting Graph resource. Second, the join link for the online meeting are written back into the calendar properties for the event so that they can be included in the meeting invitation and shared with participants. Figure 1 shows the join link for a Teams meeting as viewed in an Outlook calendar event.

The Teams online meeting object now takes precedence in terms of running meetings. The calendar event in participant mailboxes allows users to know when a meeting is scheduled and have Outlook issue reminder. However, the options used to control the online meeting such as allowing reactions, chat, the URL to join the meeting, and whether to record the meeting automatically are properties of the online meeting object. The meeting object shares its participant list with the Outlook calendar and has relationships with the recording, transcript, and attendance report.

No Way to Change a Teams Online Meeting Organizer

Coming back to the original question, can anything be done to transfer the organizer role for meetings to another user after the original organizer leaves the organization? The answer is no. The creation of an online Teams meeting sets the organizer in stone and no change is possible thereafter. The Update onlineMeeting Graph API explicitly prohibits changing the meeting organizer, saying “the organizer of the meeting cannot be modified after the meeting is created.”

Removing the calendar events from the ex-employee’s calendar has no effect on the online spaces and their settings. It just deletes the events from the calendar.

Three Ways to Tackle the Problem

If a meeting organizer cannot be changed, how should organizations handle the problem created when someone leaves an organization with active Teams meetings in place? Only three answers seem possible.

1. Leave the active online meetings in place. While meetings are active, they can be managed by co-organizers. Eventually the meetings will expire to mitigate the issue.
2. Create a replacement meeting with the same time slot, settings, and participants. The new meeting (potentially created by a utility account) becomes the active event. If the original organizer’s mailbox is still available, someone can be granted permission to access the mailbox and cancel (delete) the original meeting. Before cancelling the meeting, make sure that any required artifacts like transcripts and recordings are secure. Otherwise, the original online meeting can be left in place and participants can either delete their instance of the event from their calendar or leave it intact.
3. Use a dedicated utility account to create important company events. A utility account is a regular user account (not a shared mailbox) dedicated to event management. The account is licensed for Exchange Online and Teams. Nominated individuals can be granted access to the account to create and manage meetings. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t matter if someone leaves the organization because the meetings belong to the organization rather than an individual. Defining what an important event is and figuring out how users can apply for the creation of an online meeting is something for individual organizations to determine. The person who requests such a meeting should be made a co-organizer to allow them to handle the day-to-day management of the event, like adding or removing participants.

The second option is the right course if you’re handling the problem of dealing with active meetings organized by ex-employees and are forced to act. However, before creating replacement events, consider implementing the idea of using a utility account to manage important company events. Asking someone else to create a replacement event will certainly work, but what happens when that person decides to leave?

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For Both Teams and Skype for Business Online Meetings

In May, Microsoft published Office 365 notification (MC213856) to say that OWA and Outlook Mobile would soon make online meetings the norm. This is now the case.

The calendar settings for OWA include whether an online meeting should be created for all meetings (Figure 1). By default, the setting is controlled by the OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled setting in the Exchange Online organization configuration, which can be examined using the Get-OrganizationConfig cmdlet. Here we see that the setting is true, meaning that all meetings created by OWA are online:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Select OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled

OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled
------------------------------
                          True

Mailbox-Level Control

You can also control the setting on a mailbox basis by updating its calendar configuration with the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlet. The mailbox-level setting takes precedence over the organization setting. For example, this command disables online meetings by default for a mailbox:

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity James.Joyce –OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled $False

OWA uses the Teams configuration to figure out if Teams or Skype for Business Online is the current provider of online meetings to the tenant. The provider is noted in the calendar configuration of each mailbox. We can check which provider is used by running code like this to report the provider and if online meetings are enabled. Fetching calendar configuration can take some time to complete for more than a few mailboxes:

$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize 50
$Mbx | Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration |Select Identity, DefaultOnlineMeetingProvider, OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled

Identity       DefaultOnlineMeetingProvider OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled
--------       ---------------------------- ------------------------------
Andy.Ruth      TeamsForBusiness
Ben Owens      TeamsForBusiness
Ben.James      TeamsForBusiness
Brian Weakliam TeamsForBusiness
Imran Khan     TeamsForBusiness
James.Joyce    TeamsForBusiness             False
Kim Akers      TeamsForBusiness             True

Different Approach Used by Outlook Desktop

Outlook desktop takes a different approach to OWA. Outlook doesn’t use the calendar configuration settings stored in user mailboxes; its settings are in user profiles stored in the system registry. Currently, Outlook doesn’t have a setting to control whether all meetings should be online and instead loads an add-in to allow users to decide if a meeting should include Teams or Skype for Business Online.

When you create an online meeting, Outlook populates several properties for the meeting item stored in the mailbox containing links and other information about the online space for the meeting. The link allows users to join the online meeting at the appointed time. Apart from the link and the list of meeting attendees, Outlook has no connection to the online event, so items such as the meeting chat, participant list, and so on must be accessed through the online provider.

Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 58132 promises that Outlook for iOS will allow third-party online meeting providers like Zoom and WebEx to be the preferred provider. Microsoft was supposed to deliver the capability in August 2020, but there’s no sign of it still.

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MAPI Properties to Point to Intelligent Communications Services

Has it ever crossed your mind what differences exist between a regular meeting event scheduled in an Outlook calendar and a Teams meeting? I must admit to not caring too much about this topic until a senior Microsoft engineer said that the difference lies in the properties of the meeting event created by Outlook. Normal meetings have a set of properties such as the meeting time, time zone, and attendees. Online meetings have these properties too, but also have a set of Intelligent Communications Services properties that tell Outlook how to connect users to the online meeting.

Although the assertion was entirely logical (of course Outlook needs to know how to connect to an online meeting), my curiosity was piqued and I looked a little further.

Scheduling an Online Meeting with Outlook

The key to scheduling a teams meeting with Outlook is the Teams meeting add-in that the client automatically loads based on the user’s online configuration. If they use Skype for Business Online, Outlook loads the Skype for Business Online add-in; if it’s Teams, Outlook loads that add-in. Apart from adding a button to the calendar menu bar, the add-in serves one major purpose: when the user creates an online meeting, the add-in creates a meeting slot with the online meeting service and inserts the details of the meeting as a URI in the meeting body (Figure 1).

When the time of the Teams meeting rolls around, the user clicks the URI. The target online service responds by opening a web page to allow the user join the meeting. The services differ in how they handle the link. For instance, if the Teams desktop client is logged into the home tenant of the user who created the meeting, the meeting starts in the desktop client. On the other hand, if the user is logged in as a guest to another tenant, Teams offers the option of joining with the with the desktop client or by opening the browser client. The flow is slightly different in the mobile clients, but essentially the key is the URI because it contains the necessary information for the application to connect to the meeting. An example of a URI created for a Teams meeting scheduled through Outlook is:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MDY3ZjY0MjAtNTNmZS00NWVkLTk0Y2EtNzhjNTI5MmM5ZGUz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22b662313f-14fc-43a2-9a7a-d2e27f4f3478%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22eff4cd58-1bb8-4899-94de-795f656b4a18%22%7d

As you’d expect, the same kind of URI is inserted into meetings created using the Teams calendar app.

Users can fetch the link to send to other people from the meeting properties through the Teams calendar app by selecting a meeting (Figure 2) or using right click to view meeting details (Figure 3).

Outlook Meeting Properties

Outlook stores the information identifying an event as an online Teams meeting as MAPI properties for an item in the Calendar folder of the mailboxes of meeting participants. You can see the properties with a utility like MFCMAPI, which reveals items like OnlineMeetingConfLink (Figure 4). This property contains the name of the meeting organizer among other information. According to Microsoft’s documentation, this is a Globally Routable User Agent URI (GRUU), or a SIP URI that can be used by a user agent (client) to connect to an online meeting. Because the description comes from the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol documentation, it’s probably a link designed for use by mobile clients that synchronize the calendar folder to a device.

Another interesting property is SkypeTeamsMeetingURI (Figure 5). This is the link that meeting participants use to join an online meeting. As the name suggests, the same property can be used by either Skype for Business Online or by Teams.

Other properties exist for online meetings that I don’t describe here. But the important point is that the difference between a regular meeting event created in an Outlook calendar and one that involves an online meeting are a set of properties holding information to allow clients to connect to the online service. Whether that quite counts as a connection to Intelligent Communication Services is another matter.

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