(Update: Meeting organizers can now download this list after the meeting is over)
Microsoft announced a bunch of new features coming to Microsoft Teams at its annual Build Developer Conference this week, including Visual Studio Code integration, a new Bookings app, and more. However, a top-requested feature by the education community using Teams for video calls is now available, though it probably flew under the radar.
Starting this week, Teams Meeting organizers can download attendance reports in the app, which includes joining and leave times for participants. In a Microsoft 365 Roadmap document, Microsoft noted that the feature is now generally available on Windows 10, Mac, and the web, but the software giant indicated that Office 365 admins need to enable it manually. Importantly, the meeting attendance list can only be downloaded during the meeting for now:
We have enabled download of a meeting attendance list during a meeting. This is released for general availability. Please note this feature is turned off by default, and needs to be enabled via admin policy. Note: We are continuing to work on enabling download after a meeting has concluded, as well.
This particular feature has been requested by the education community since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. For anyone who has used video conferencing, you may know that keeping track of participants is a real issue. Teachers can now use this report to track student attendance in online classes, as an alternative way to do a roll call. On the other hand, large organizations with hundreds of participants can also rely on these reports to figure out participants who skipped the meetings.
If you are a Teams meeting organizer, you can save a record of participants who attended it from the Participants pane of the meeting. To download the meeting attendance report during the meeting, click the Show participants icon and then select Download attendee list. The report will be downloaded as a .CSV file that can be opened in Excel and it contains the name, join time and leave time of all meeting attendees.
As noted above, the feature is turned off by default, and Office 365 Admins need to set a Teams meeting policy to enable it. In addition, they can navigate to the Teams admin center > Analytics & reports > Usage reports to view additional meeting attendance data. If required, IT Admins can also assign the Report reader role for the meeting organizers so they can access the Teams admin reports themselves. We invite you to check out the official support page to learn more about how to turn on this feature.
