Every scheduled meeting carries a hidden second layer: the options screen. It decides who waits in the lobby, who may share their screen, whether participants arrive muted, and whether a recording may exist at all. Organisers who never open it inherit the organisation's defaults — which are usually the most permissive setting available.
Who Can Bypass the Lobby
The lobby is the waiting room between clicking join and entering the call. The options screen lets you choose who walks straight in:
- Everyone — fastest, and the least safe for external-facing meetings; the link is the only key.
- People in my organisation — the sensible default for internal work.
- People I invite — right for client calls where the invite list is the guest list.
- Only me — for hearings, interviews, and anything where unannounced entry would be a problem.
Note the interaction with anonymous join: if your organisation permits joining without signing in, "everyone" truly means everyone, including whoever the link was forwarded to.
Presenter Versus Attendee
Two roles matter inside the call. Presenters can share content, admit people from the lobby, and manage the room; attendees can speak, chat, and react. The options screen sets who starts as presenter: organisers only, the internal people, or everyone. For workshops where several people demo, grant presenter rights individually during the call instead of opening the door to all.
The three toggles worth setting every time
1) Mute participants on entry — silence the door slam of twenty microphones. 2) Allow microphone for attendees — switch it off for webinars, keep it on for working sessions. 3) Recording and transcription — decide before the meeting, announce at the start, and disable if the topic is sensitive.
Recording, Transcripts, and Attendance Reports
Recording captures audio, video and shared screens; transcription produces a searchable text track with speaker labels; the attendance report lists who joined and when. All three are organiser-controlled and all three persist after the call ends, stored under the organiser's account and subject to your organisation's retention rules. Treat them as documents, not as ephemera: label them, file them, and delete them when the purpose expires.
Breakout Rooms and Together Mode
Two features change the shape of a meeting rather than its permissions. Breakout rooms split a large call into parallel small rooms — invaluable for workshops, and they can be pre-assigned from the options screen. Layout modes (gallery, speaker, together-style) are personal view choices; they affect only what you see, never what others see, so experiment freely.
A Sane Default Template
- Lobby: people in my organisation bypass; external guests wait.
- Presenters: organisers and co-organisers only.
- Mute on entry: on. Allow microphone: on for working sessions.
- Recording: off by default; enable per meeting with an announcement.
- Chat: enabled — it is the parking lot, the link drop, and the accessibility lifeline.
Set these once as your personal habit and most meeting-security questions answer themselves. The following chapter covers the other half of synchronous work: plain voice calls, dial-in numbers, and voicemail.
