If Vinyl isn't joining your Microsoft Teams meetings, it may be due to how anonymous participants are handled in your organisation's Teams settings.
Vinyl joins meetings as an external (anonymous) participant, which means certain Teams policies can block it from entering unless configured correctly.
Anonymous users include:
People who aren't signed into Teams with a work account
External users from organisations that either:
Aren't listed in your trusted domains
Haven't configured mutual trust (your org trusts theirs, but not vice versa)
Vinyl will be treated as anonymous unless your organisation allows external access and anonymous meeting join.
How to Allow Anonymous Join for Meetings
As a Teams admin, you can allow anonymous users (like Vinyl) to join meetings by enabling a few key settings.
Go to the Teams admin center
Expand Meetings > Meeting settings
Scroll to Meeting Join and Lobby
Toggle Anonymous users can join a meeting → On
Click Save
This allows all users in your organisation to create meetings that allow anonymous access.
If your organisation uses Teams Premium, you can also allow anonymous users to join after verifying via one-time passcode:
Use the per-organiser policy: Anonymous users can join a meeting after verifying
This requires the meeting organiser to have a Teams Premium licence
If your meeting attendees or organisers have external access disabled, users (including Vinyl) may be flagged as anonymous, even if domains are trusted.
Make sure both:
Your organisation allows external access
The other party's organisation does too
This ensures mutual trust and avoids blocked participants.
Why Vinyl appears as "(Unverified)" in your meeting
You may notice the Vinyl Recording Assistant appears in your Teams meeting labelled Vinyl (Unverified) rather than Vinyl (External). This is expected behaviour and does not affect recording, Vinyl will still join and capture the meeting as normal.
The label Teams assigns depends on the relationship between the participant and your organisation's tenant:
(Unverified) — The participant is joining anonymously: either not signed into a Microsoft account, or signed in but without a trusted relationship with your tenant. This is how Vinyl appears by default.
(External) — The participant is signed into a Microsoft account and has an established trusted relationship with your tenant (their domain has been whitelisted via your External Access settings).
No label — The participant belongs to your own organisation's tenant.
Profile pictures follow the same logic. Teams only displays a participant's profile picture (when their camera is off) if they have a trusted relationship with your tenant. Vinyl won't show a profile picture by default, this is expected.
Removing the "(Unverified)" label via External Access
If you'd prefer Vinyl to appear as Vinyl (External) rather than Vinyl (Unverified), a Teams admin can whitelist Vinyl's domain in your organisation's External Access settings. This establishes a trusted relationship so Vinyl is recognised as a verified external participant.
To configure this:
Go to the Teams admin centre → Users → External access
If you're using a domain allowlist rather than allowing all external domains, add Vinyl's domain to the list of trusted organisations
Click Save
If your organisation already allows all external domains, no additional configuration is needed. Contact [email protected] to get Vinyl's domain details for whitelisting.
You can also find more information here: Microsoft Docs – Manage external meetings and chat