Attendance reports in Microsoft Teams allow you to track who attended (or failed to attend) a team meeting. You can enable such a feature within PowerShell. However, you cannot enable the feature for all users. An unfortunate result of changes to Microsoft Teams is the inability to attain a report for a meeting you did not instigate. As such, if you’re looking to share an attendance report with “non-organizers,” you’ll have to download and distribute the document manually. If you’d like to see a more efficient method in the future, please vote for the change here.
Only meeting organizers can view and download attendance reports, secretaries and assistants can’t.
Microsoft Support
Solution:
- Open Microsoft Teams
- Access your team
- Open the Meet dropdown
- Click Meet now
- Click
...in the right sidebar - Select Download attendance list
- Open the Downloads folder in your file explorer
- Click New conversation
- Drag and drop the file meeting attendance list into the teams’ chat
While it is not yet possible to attain an attendance report without the meeting organizer, organizers can still redistribute their downloaded copy of the attendance report. Teaching you to do this will be my goal today. However, I will also show you how to enable attendance reports (should you have not yet done so). Lastly, I’ll be covering why some attendance reports vanish after some time.
Contents:
- [1] How to share an attendance report in Microsoft Teams
- [2] Why my shared Teams attendance report is gone
- [3] How to enable attendance reports in Microsoft Teams
- [4] Recap & Farewell
PSST, HEY, YOU
(YEAH, YOU!)
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How to share an attendance report in Microsoft Teams
Step 1 – Open Microsoft Teams
Before sharing an attendance report, we must first get a hold of one; that means starting a meeting in Teams. Thus, you’ll want to have the application open before we continue.
Step 2 – Access your Team
Look for the “people icon” in your left sidebar; that’s the Teams view button. Click it and shift your attention to the adjacent panel. In the panel, you will find each of your teams listed- open the team you’d like to use by clicking it.
Step 3 – Setup a meeting
Attached to the “Meet” textbox is a dropdown trigger; select the trigger to activate the dropdown and then click “Meet now.” Doing so will not immediately start a meeting but instead allow you to set some preferences before joining/beginning the meeting.
Step 4 – Join your meeting
Before joining a meeting, you can use the newly opened window to set up your audio input and output devices. You can additionally use the window to set up your video input settings. For the demonstration, such configurations won’t matter. Click “Join now” to continue.
Step 5 – Download the attendance list for your meeting
You can find a button depicting three dots ... next to the “Participants” header in the meeting. Click the button to reveal a dropdown, in which you can select “Download attendance list.” If you cannot complete this step, you likely haven’t enabled attendance reports.
Step 6 – Activate the chat input field
After returning to your Teams’ chat, select “New conversation” to reveal the text-input field.
Step 7 – Drag & drop the report into the input field
In the file explorer, locate your attendance report in your Downloads folder. The file name will resemble meetingAttendanceList.csv closely. Click and hold the file while dragging it toward the Teams’ text-input field. Finally, release the file.
Step 8 – Send the file to the Teams’ chat
Below the textbox is a ribbon of actions; use the right-facing arrow to the far right of the ribbon to send the file to the chat.
Why is my shared Teams attendance report gone?
Reports are stored along with the organizer’s other data, like emails and contacts. Reports are permanently deleted if they leave the organization, and no one else can access them.
Microsoft Support
When you send messages or upload files to Teams, Microsoft 365 associates the messages or files with your data. Thus, the deletion of your data can result in the deletion of distributed messages and files on Teams. As a result, Microsoft 365 may delete uploaded reports when an employee leaves an organization. However, the data purge does not have to be the end; store copies locally on your PC where they will be unaffected.
How to enable attendance reports in Microsoft Teams
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global - AllowEngagementReport "Enabled"With an administrative account, you’re able to enable (or disable) attendance reports for Microsoft Teams within PowerShell. You’ll need to enter the above cmdlet into PowerShell to do so. I recommend Nicos Paphitis’ video for a more in-depth explanation.
Recap & Farewell
Recap
Microsoft Teams’ attendance reports were accessible to each meeting participant in the past; this changed in recent years, requiring you to be the meeting’s organizer to attain the original copy of the report. Albeit, non-organizers can still access a report, should the meeting’s organizer share the file with them. Unfortunately, relying on the Teams’ uploaded reports can be problematic. When employees leave an organization, Microsoft 365 begins deleting their data: this includes messages they have sent and files they have uploaded. It would be best to encourage employees to store a copy locally to circumvent this issue.
Farewell
I hope you found this post helpful. Like all of our content, we intended for this post to be a comprehensive and effective guide. If you’re using Microsoft 365 often, I believe you’d benefit from looking into the rest of our content. Regardless of your decision, you have my thanks for reading this far.
Our related articles:
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- A complete guide to Microsoft Teams permissions – Permissions play a big part in what you can and cannot do- that applies to your teams’ members too. Thus, as one would imagine, knowing about permissions is beneficial. If your interest has been picked, go and have a read.
- A complete troubleshooting guide for Microsoft Teams not letting you change your status – Statuses are used in Microsoft Teams to indicate what you’re doing to team members. For instance, using the “Busy” status to show team member’s you’re unavailable. If you’re having issues updating your status- you may want to give this post a read.
- How to download an attendee list in Microsoft Teams after the meeting – Attendee lists allow you to keep a log of who joined a meeting and when they left. As a meeting organiser, you’re able to download such a document. However, other users wilol not be able to view the document unless you share it amongst them.