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Participant list and gallery view disappears during a Lync 2013 or Skype for Business 2015 conference

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There can be times when attending a Lync or Skype for Business conference you may experience that the participant list and gallery view disappears.    A new roster management feature that was introduced in Lync 2013 was implemented to conserve resources.  When the threshold value for the number of participants goes beyond 75 attendees, the logic to disable the participant list and gallery view for non-presenters is initiated.  All Presenters and Attendees are completely hidden.  This behavior occurs when the AllowLargeMeetings parameter is set to false in the Conferencing Policy.  The presenters of the meeting will not have the same experience and will continue to see the information.

The following message will appear to the attendees.

Capture

When the AllowLargeMeetings parameter is set to true in the Conference Policy, different behaviors are initiated for the roster management feature such as:

  • Hides the attendee roster (only the currently attendee is listed)
  • Disables errors in the IM window
  • Disables multi-party video
  • Disables ability to promote an attendee to presenter
  • Disables ability to unmute individual attendees
  • Disables ability to apply the "Lock Video Spotlight" feature to attendees.

Note:  It is important to plan ahead and be aware of the above behaviors when AllLargeMeetings is setup in the Conferencing Policy.  A meeting organizer should plan ahead and at the time the meeting is scheduled,  the organizer should identity the attendees who may need to be presenters in the meeting.

PowerShell cmdlets of interest:    Get-CsConferencingPolicy,  Set-CsConferencingPolicy

 

For additional information, reference the following:  Managing Large and Structured Meetings with Lync 2013