As we have become more comfortable with the concept of working within a Team in Microsoft Teams, I see more and more people using Channel Meetings instead of the familiar meeting scheduled through an email client.  With that transition, I have also saw an odd issue reported a few times recently that required a little investigation. 

In the usual Channel meeting experience, members of the Team will see a post in the channel that the meeting was started in along with a “Join” button to participate in the action.

For the reported scenario, though, a Channel meeting is actively in progress however, someone (or multiple someones) report that they are unable to join.  This issue goes beyond the usual challenges that we see with joining online meetings.  In this case, we can see that the meeting has started but they do not even see a “Join” button in the channel to attempt to participate in the meeting.

What could be wrong here??

My first inclination was to think there was some sort of miscommunication, maybe the person attempted to join after the meeting had already ended or something was wrong with the Teams client itself.  After ruling those things out, the next step was to generate debug logs. 

To generate Teams debug logs, you’re going to need a lot of fingers ready.  Logs are generated on Windows clients by pressing the CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+1 keys.  It may seem as if nothing is happening but head over to your Downloads folder and you’ll see a slew of files appear that begin with “MSTeams Diagnostics Log…”  The symptoms of the issue you are investigating will determine which log you’ll want to start with but in our case I just went to the default client log file.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for at this point as it was a new issue and I don’t frequently dive deep into the Teams debug logs.  Scrolling through, looking for something that stood out, I saw lots of info about the user who generated the logs and the computer they were using including the type of machine, time zone, etc.  Speaking of time zone, I wouldn’t call myself an expert on variance from UTC but the time on this particular computer did catch my eye.

You see, I was working with someone who lived in the eastern part of the United States.  Eastern time is definitely not -9.5 which was verified by a quick Bing search (yes, I do actually use Bing and have for years).  The search found that this is Marquesas Island Time.  I’d really love to be living on island time but alas we are not.

A very simple solution!

We found that the time was set correctly on the computer, but the time zone was incorrectly set.  After correcting the time zone and testing, the ability to join active channel meetings was restored!  While the Teams client could probably handle that scenario a bit better, now you at least know what to look for if you are experiencing the same.