Ethan M. brought an interesting point to my attention. He had scheduled a LiveMeeting though Outlook and invited an outside (non-employee) person to the LiveMeeting. When the person tried to join, they got an error message saying "you do not have permission to join the meeting". See the screencap below:
Now this was strange because this is the error you normally see when you’ve forgotten to allow anonymous participants in your LiveMeetings. I checked the following places:
- Edge Server properties
- Front End server
- OCS policy
All places indicated that anonymous users were allowed to join meetings. I was scratching my head trying to come up with the source of the prob. And then I had a brainstorm: check to make sure that Ethan had allowed anonymous participants in the meeting invite itself. When you schedule meetings through outlook, you have the ability to override the system policy of allowing anonymous users.
I had Ethan check his settings in outlook in the meeting invites that he was sending. And there it was: Under "Access" he had "Open Authenticated" checked. I switched it to Anonymous and life returned to normal.
Next on my list is to determine if this setting was a holdover from his LiveMeeting 2005 client, a freak accident, or an inadvertent tick of the check box. For now, I’m going to use this as the first question to ask users who experience this problem.
