Audio-Only Recording to Protect User Privacy During Recording Playback

In 2023, mesh avatars were the focus for helping people who didn’t like to appear with their video turned on in Teams meetings. To some, it seemed utterly cool to be able to hand over their visual online presence to an avatar that they created with care to be broadly similar to their real self. Avatars are dumb (your voice remains your voice), but they can express some visual reactions to what happened during meetings.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released the ability to create a mesh avatar from a photo in an attempt to make the avatars more realistic. Figure 1 shows the avatar I created from my photo. My efforts didn’t create a very realistic digital presence.

The Avatars for Teams service plan is included with many Microsoft 365 and Office 365 products, so most the Teams installed base of 320 million monthly active users can use avatars. According to the Teams Avatar app, 83.8K people installed the app to create or update their avatars in the last month, so interest remains in having a way to attend meetings in a visual sense without projecting our real self, flawed and imperfect as that might be.

Audio-Only Recording for Teams Meetings

Which brings us neatly to the news announced in Microsoft 365 message notification MC1173926 (16 October 2025) that the Teams meeting recording feature will soon be able to create an audio-only recording. Deployment of the feature to make it generally available has started and should be complete in late November 2025.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft says that making an audio-only recording for a meeting offers “a more comfortable and convenient recording experience.” Microsoft goes on to note that audio-only recording “alleviates concerns about facial information exposure when recording is necessary, offering a more privacy-conscious approach to recording meetings.”

I thought avatars were all about making the visual side of meetings more comfortable for users. However, it’s important to remember that using avatars is a personal choice to customize the video feed for people who opt to use avatars. Audio-only recording is a meeting option to suppress the video feed that flows into the meeting recording for all users, no matter whether they use Teams desktop, browser, or mobile clients. Participants can have their cameras turned on during meetings, but only the audio feeds will make it into the .MP4 file created in the meeting organizer’s OneDrive for Business account.

Suppressing the video feed for the recording means that anyone who plays the recording afterwards cannot see how the participants appeared during the meeting, including if any avatars are used. All the playback can deliver is the audio stream. This is what Microsoft means when they refer to a more privacy-conscious approach. It seems reasonable to say that if you’re not in a meeting, privacy of the participants is better respected if you cannot see how people appeared during the meeting.

The ability to generate a meeting transcript depends on the audio feed, so suppressing the video feed has no impact on the transcript.

No Administrative Controls

There doesn’t seem to be any administrative control in the Teams meeting policy for an organization to decide that audio-only recording is the default or only option for Teams meetings. Microsoft says that administrator intervention is unnecessary because audio-only recording “integrates into existing workflows.” In other words, “Audio only” is an option in a drop-down menu for an organizer to decide what to record for a meeting (Figure 2).

See the Microsoft documentation for more information about recordings for Teams meetings.

Little Value in the Video Stream in Recordings

It took me a little while to work out why Microsoft wanted to introduce audio-only recordings for Teams meetings. After thinking things through, I think this is a good idea. Few of us really want our visual appearance to be replayed in recordings, and it’s uncertain if the video stream adds much value to those who listen to recordings after an event. The transcript is a much more valuable artifact, especially if Microsoft 365 Copilot can reason over it to produce a summary and action items.

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Teams Meetings and Outlook Events

Microsoft announced the co-organizer role for Teams meetings in MC292796 last November. After frequent delays, the latest date for deployment is early March with roll-out to complete by mid-March, a general availability date confirmed by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 81391. Ever since the announcement, users have debated the set of capabilities available to co-organizers and complained that it’s not possible for a co-organizer to change the details of a meeting, such as rearranging the date or time. On February 25, a reply posted to the Microsoft Technical community reported by an unnamed Microsoft product manager said “Co-organizers will be able to access and modify meeting options before, during, or even after the meeting — just like the Organizer can.”

I have not been able to confirm the accuracy of the assertion but hope that it’s true. The problem people have with the current implementation is how to handle the situation when the original organizer of a meeting is unavailable (on vacation, ill, or has left the company), and the need exists to change the meeting details. Only the meeting organizer can edit details like the date and time of the meeting, its participants, and so on.

Take the meeting shown in Figure 1. The meeting is organizer is obvious, but the two organizers are not visible through the OWA calendar. Instead, Teams uses meeting metadata inserted into the Outlook calendar event to grant the co-organizer role and its permissions to the nominated users after they join a meeting.

It’s possible that Microsoft chose this implementation to avoid the need to change the Outlook calendar. This makes sense because it means that users can continue to access and interact with calendar events in Outlook clients without worrying about the details required by Teams to run the online portion of the meeting.

What a Meeting Co-Organizer Can Do

Outside an active meeting, the co-organizer role has no power, which is why Microsoft stresses that the capabilities available to a co-organizer are during the Teams meeting. In this state, a co-organizer can:

• Access and change meeting options.
• Bypass the lobby.
• Admit people from the lobby during a meeting.
• Lock the meeting.
• Present content.
• Update another participant’s meeting role.
• End the meeting.

However, because the co-organizer role has no influence when a meeting is not active, a co-organizer cannot:

• View and download attendance reports.
• Edit the meeting invitation.
• Manage the meeting recording.
• Remove or change the Organizer role.

In addition, a co-organizer cannot create and manage breakout rooms for a meeting.

Scheduling Teams Meetings in Group Calendars

It is possible to schedule online Teams meetings from Outlook by creating the meeting in the calendar of a Microsoft 365 group (Figure 2). However, although the meeting has all the attributes of an online Teams meeting, the group is the meeting owner, and there’s no way to access meeting options to assign the co-organizer role to a participant. When the meeting is active, the person who schedules the meeting takes on the organizer role, but they cannot make another attendee a co-organizer.

On the upside, because the meeting is in the group calendar, any group member can update its settings, including rescheduling the meeting for a new date and time.

Using Central Scheduling

The workaround is not new. Like the method to avoid delegates reading protected email, it comes from old on-premises implementations of Exchange when it was common to schedule important organizational gatherings using a shared mailbox. Meeting coordinators with delegate access to the shared mailbox would create and manage meetings using the shared mailbox calendar, and because multiple delegates had access to the shared mailbox, meetings were accessible and manageable even when some of the delegates were unavailable.

The modern version of this scenario is to create a new Microsoft 365 account and assign it Exchange Online Plan 1 and Teams licenses (or any SKU which includes these service plans). People who need to organize organizational meetings like webinars or large employee gatherings then ask the people who run the central scheduling mailbox to:

• Create a new Teams meeting at the desired time with the required attendees.
• Edit meeting options to assign the co-organizer role to the requester and/or other people (Figure 3).

If the need subsequently exists to reschedule the meeting, add new co-organizers, or update the meeting invitation, it can be done through the central scheduling mailbox.

A regular mailbox is necessary because shared mailboxes can’t use Teams and you need Teams to apply the roles and other metadata to create online meetings.

This arrangement isn’t perfect. More steps are necessary to create a meeting; the central scheduling mailbox comes with a small licensing cost; and someone must manage meeting requests and updates. It’s also something which should be constrained to a minimum of meetings – those that need to happen even if the main organizer becomes unavailable for some reason. Other meetings should be created and run as normal. The hope is that this is a short-term bridge before Microsoft updates the co-organizer role to allow its holders to manage meeting details.

If anyone has a better idea, I am all ears… as are the folks who want to avoid issues when meeting organizers aren’t available.

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Sharing the Load of Meeting Organization

Updated December 8, 2022

According to MC292796 (last updated June 23, 2022, Microsoft 365 roadmap 81391), Teams will soon allow meeting organizers to assign a new Teams meeting co-organizer role to up to 10 meeting participants. Microsoft expects to roll out the capability to tenants in mid-June 2022 and complete the deployment worldwide by late July. There’s already been multiple slippages in these dates, so don’t depend on them.

The new co-organizer role joins the existing meeting roles:

• Organizer: The person who creates and owns the meeting.
• Presenter: Nominated meeting attendees who can present at the meeting and perform other actions such as admitting people waiting in the lobby or sharing content.
• Attendee: Other meeting participants whose actions during a meeting are controlled by meeting settings (for instance, is chat available).

The co-organizer role fits between organizer and presenter in terms of what they can do during the meeting. Like the presenter role, the co-organizer role is optional. It is intended to allow an organizer to share the workload involved in managing large or complex meetings like webinars. Compared to the presenter role, the most important capability gained by co-organizers is being able to access and modify meeting options. It’s likely that co-organizers will only be nominated in a small minority of Teams meetings.

Some of these meetings might be better run as Live events, especially when view-only attendees kick in after the attendance passes the 1,000 threshold. Microsoft makes this point in MC297608 (November 11), saying that “For larger meetings, and especially for any meeting over 1,000 attendees, Microsoft recommends using Teams Live Events.” In other words, spreading the load across a bunch of co-organizers might not make a large meeting as manageable as a live event would be.

Adding Co-Organizers

Adding co-organizers to a meeting is simple and follows the same approach taken to nominate presenters. Edit the meeting options and select co-organizers from the set of people already invited to the meeting (Figure 1) and save the settings.

Note that the “Only me” option in the Who can present setting is now “Only me and co-presenters.” In passing, when I look at the meeting settings available in December 2019, the change in the number of settings now available to organizers is quite startling.

Only tenant accounts can be chosen as Teams meeting co-organizers. This is different to the presenter role, which can be assigned to guest accounts from other Teams tenants. The reason is likely to be because co-organizers can change the roles assigned to meeting participants.

Co-organizers are shown as meeting organizers when meetings start. Other people who have been assigned the Teams meeting co-organizer role but have not joined the meeting (like Chris Bishop in Figure 2) don’t receive this designation until they join the meeting.

During an event, a Teams meeting co-organizer can:

• Access and change meeting options.
• Bypass the lobby.
• Admit people from the lobby during a meeting.
• Lock the meeting.
• Present content.
• Update another participant’s meeting role.
• End the meeting.

In preview from December 2022 and expected to be generally available in January 2023 (MC481829, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 105014), co-organizers can:

• Create breakout rooms.
• Configure room settings, including appointing additional Breakout Room managers.
• Assign participants to breakout rooms.
• Add and remove breakout rooms from a meeting.
• Open and close breakout rooms
• Send announcements to participants in breakout rooms.
• Rename and delete breakout rooms.

Teams meeting co-organizers cannot:

• View and download attendance reports.
• Edit the meeting invitation.
• Manage the meeting recording.
• Remove or change the Organizer role.

People have pointed to the inability of holders of the co-organizer role to update the details of a meeting. Although Microsoft might allow co-organizers to update meeting details in the future, for now, a workaround is discussed here.

Managing Meeting Recordings

Microsoft says that a co-organizer cannot manage the meeting recording. Well, this is true if the organizer starts the recording because Teams then creates the video file in the Recordings folder of the organizer’s OneDrive for Business account. However, if a co-organizer starts the recording, they become the owner of the recording because Teams creates the file in their OneDrive for Business account. This is the same as what happens when a presenter starts a meeting recording.

A Feature for Some but Not All

I suspect the advent of the Teams meeting co-organizer role will pass by many people without being noticed. That isn’t to say that giving meeting organizers the chance to share work with co-organizers isn’t valuable: it is, but only in circumstances where the work involved in a meeting like a webinar merits more than a single organizer. In that context, this is a valuable feature.

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