Workaround for the Teams issue: video sharing is disabled by your administrator

This is how to work around the Microsoft Teams issue: video sharing is disabled by the administrator.

The issue

This issue occurs when the following settings are in the policy applying to the meeting organizer:

• Allow IP video is set to On
• Let anonymous people start a meeting is set to Off

To reproduce the issue:
– Invite an external user (Teams or non teams user).
– External user(s) join on the web from email link or Teams web client calendar (any supported browser).
– Organiser then joins the meeting.

The external users who joined before the organizer then get the message: “Video sharing is disabled by the administrator” and camera icon is greyed out.

– Organiser leaves the meeting and joins again, video now works for the external users.

Microsoft response

We raised this issue with Microsoft and received the following response:

Per our conversation today I have consulted with my senior colleagues regarding this issue and was informed this is by design due to the meeting policies settings. You can submit a UserVoice to request for this feature to be changed which I have provided a link below for the UserVoice. The only other options are the work around you have currently been using of leaving and rejoining the meeting as the organizer after accepting the external user into the meeting or request for the external user to leave and rejoin the meeting after the organizer has joined. https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/40614934-video-sharing-is-disabled-by-the-administrator

So the MS support guy said that it was because the policies cannot apply before the organizer starts, so Teams does not know if video should be disabled or not. But why it can’t apply the policies once the organizer joins I don’t know, the message that video is disabled is incorrect in my opinion. The uservoice is just someone else complaining about the issue.

This can be very frustrating for users, none of the external users who joined before the organizer can enable their video. The organizer has to rejoin the meeting in order for video to start working which is a pretty poor experience.

Workarounds

So current workarounds are as follows:

In the Meeting policy applying to the users, set ‘Let anonymous people start a meeting is set’ to On. This does mean that the meeting will start immediately, and anonymous or web users will be able to chat between themselves.

Failing that, rejoin the meeting (organizer or affected external users).