Microsoft Teams Selective Muting

Question

Hello Microsoft Community,

I have a unique problems regarding Microsoft Teams:

When we have board members that cannot attend a board meeting, we hold the meeting by teleconference. We've moved to Office365 and now we use Teams exclusively. The problem is, that the Board member that attends via Teams, does not speak the same language as the board members that are in the meeting room; therefore, everything that is said in the meeting room needs to be translated.

The translators listen in via microphones in the room. They then are supposed to translate to the person via teleconference. But the meeting room does not need the translation, when that person talks. 

Is it possible to have a Teams meeting, where the participant decides who to mute, and who not to mute, individually, and the setting is set for the person, and not for the whole meeting? We need a set up like this:

• Meeting room needs to hear the person attending via teleconference;
• Meeting room does not need to hear the interpreters;
• The person attending via teleconference needs to hear the interpreters;

Illustrated in the image below:

The way that we're working around this limitation of individualized muting, is by setting up two teams meetings, one for everyone except the interpreters, and another just between the interpreters and the person attending via teleconference. 

Then the person via teleconference attends two teams meetings with two devices at the same time, one with the meeting with the interpreters, and one with the meeting with the meeting room.

Does anyone have a more elegant solution to this issue?

P.S. if this is not the right place to ask the question, someone please move it to the right place, or let me know where I should post the question.

Answer 1

Hello Partin2,

Thanks for your post in forum. Regarding your description, it is hard to achieve. We can do following things for mute in meeting in Teams.

Mute someone in a meeting:

Mute individual meeting participants straight from the meeting roster to cut down on background noise. If someone has been muted, they’ll get a notification letting them know. They’ll be able to unmute themselves if they need to chime in.

Mute everyone in a meeting:

If you ever need to mute all the other participants in a meeting, head to your meeting roster and select Mute all. Each individual will get a notification and be able to unmute themselves if they need to.

Also, you can mute the interpreters in meeting, but the attendees via teleconference cannot hear the interpreters as well. Therefore, in my opinion, there might not better workaround than setting up two teams meetings.

On another hand, if it cannot meet your requirements, we recommend you that please give a feedback to https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public. Microsoft will always focus on customer’s feedback and experience, some new features would be added to the services based on customers' feedback in the future, and your good ideas will be very helpful for them to improve the service.

Your time, understanding and cooperation will be highly appreciated.

Regards,

Darpan