Google Meets is a virtual meeting service (audio & video) provided in our Concordia Google Suite. It integrates well with Google Calendar and Mail along with other Google services. External guests, however, have posed challenges for some, as they try to manage meetings.
An external guest is a participant in a CUE-hosted Google Meet who does not use (or have) a CUE Google account. They may be an invited speaker, a contractor, or any other sort of individual participating in a CUE meeting or class. They are distinguished from CUE participants, who are anyone participating in the Google Meet using their CUE Google account (either @student.concordia.ab.ca or @concordia.ab.ca). Therefore, an instructor or student who connects to a Google Meet and does not use their CUE Google account will be treated as an external user.
Unlike CUE participants, guests may not automatically permitted entry into Google Meets. If the account they are invited with is not a Google account (and they are not signed in), they will need to make a request to join, which must be approved by the meeting host, before entering. If the external guest that was invited to a Meet is logged in to Google with the same account that was invited (even if not a part of CUE), they will be directly admitted into the meeting. This means that your external users will have slightly different experience based on their organization's setup (are they a Google G Suite user?) and whether they are logged into that account when they try to join the meeting.
In simple terms, a meeting host is the organizer of a Google Meet, however, there are some caveats to that statement (see below). As the host, they have additional functions in the meeting that other participants do not have such as muting other participants, creating polls, etc. For the purposes of this guide, the key feature that the meeting host has is the ability to admit external guests into the meeting. If the host of the meeting does not join the meeting, there will be nobody on the call to actually admit those external guests when they make the request.
Caveats:
You can tell if you are the host of a Google Meet by joining the meeting (at any time) and looking for the blue "Host controls" badge in the bottom left of the Google Meet window.
In most cases, the process is simple and familiar.
There are a few things to look at, which may help fix this problem.