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Allow Anonymous Participant Access to Teams Meetings

Updated over a week ago

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.

  1. Go to the Teams admin center

  2. Expand Meetings > Meeting settings

  3. Scroll to Meeting Join and Lobby

  4. Toggle Anonymous users can join a meeting → On

  5. 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.

You can also find more information in here: Microsoft Docs – Manage external meetings and chat

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