Microsoft Exchange Online – Configuration Change for online meetings by default

Whether you’re working from home or meeting with people in other locations, we will be making a change so that all meetings created in Outlook will automatically be online to allow everyone to attend. This will rollout on desktop, web, mobile and Mac.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 81995.

When this will happen

This will rollout starting in late August 2021 and will complete by late November.

How this will affect your organization:

Once this feature rolls out, all meetings created in Outlook will be set to be online meetings by default. If you take no action, users enabled for Teams or Skype in your tenant will be set to have all of their meetings created as online meetings.

• This only applies if a user is enabled for Teams or Skype. In a future update, we will add support for 3rd party online meeting add-ins, but we do not yet have a timeline for that update.
• This will apply to meetings with at least one attendee other than the organizer, and meetings with a duration less than 24 hours.

What you need to do to prepare:

If you want all the meetings in your organization to be online by default, there is nothing you need to do. You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.

If you don’t want all the meetings in your organization to be online by default, you will need to disable this feature using PowerShell and set the OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled parameter to $false. If you want your organization to have online meetings by default except for a few individual users, you can also disable this feature per mailbox using the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlet.

Please click Additional Information for a link to the Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet.