Now unauthenticated meeting attendees are denied chat access in Microsoft Teams.
Remember that trend when people were joining meetings on video conferencing platforms without invitation. This virtual intrusion was very annoying for attendees. Microsoft is working on a fix to deter such occurrences on teams.
Microsoft is gearing on a Teams upgrade that will prevent people from misusing the collaborative platform.
According to a new entry in the Microsoft Office 365 product roadmap, meeting hosts will soon be able to limit chat access for unauthenticated users. This will protect attendees from undesired interruptions.
Microsoft wants to enable meeting hosts to disable chat write access for unauthenticated users. This will also disable chat write for non-federated users who joined Teams meetings through a link.
Teams bombing
Pranksters and cybercriminals embraced zoom bombing – a frustrating new method in the early months of the pandemic. Due to remote working and online learning this trend started and interrupted many meetings.
People used to infiltrate a meeting through a link revealed online in order to interrupt the session. It all started as a harmless prank but then cybercriminals chimed in to eavesdrop on confidential talks.
The problem got so extensive that in the United States, zoom-bombing was deemed a federal misdemeanor punishable by penalties and even jail.
Since then, the major video conferencing services have included a variety of mitigations to thwart such disruptions. It varies from password protection to pre-meeting waiting rooms.
Microsoft is hoping that the next Teams upgrade will fix this by allowing meeting hosts to ban anonymous participants from flooding the in-meeting chat log. This feature is still in development; however, it should be available to all Microsoft Teams subscribers by the end of July.
This feature is one of several updates released by Microsoft in recent months to improve the video conferencing experience.
In May Microsoft Teams also launched a new meeting type developed especially to facilitate parent-teacher conferences. This was done so to aid in enhancing the delivery of virtual presentations.
As of now, Microsoft is preparing for the next fiscal year the software giant is ensuring that the proper resources are matched to the right opportunity. We all hope that it continues to make improvements in Teams as it has served us well during and after the pandemic.
