Microsoft Teams is revolutionising the way we work. Part of it is out of necessity, but advances in cloud computing have made remote working easier for most people.
As a result of working from home, the number of business events people attend has declined significantly. They’ve been replaced by virtual events, often in the form of webinars. If you want to run your own live event, it’s easy to do in Teams. Find out what you need to do to run a live event in Teams.
Teams Live Event vs Meeting
In a meeting, you can have up to 250 participants, and meetings are designed for collaboration between colleagues, suppliers and clients. Attendees can share webcam video, share their screens, use whiteboard functionality and more. Meetings are for best for smaller, collaborative efforts rather than presenting to a larger group.
Live events are designed for presentation style meetings, where you can have up to 10,000 in attendance. Most attendees can view only – and can only participate via a text-based Q&A. Attendees cannot share their audio, video or screen.
Running Teams Live Events
To host a live event, you don’t need a special subscription – you just need a Microsoft 365 license that includes Microsoft Teams. To run a live event, you will need to:
- Go to the Calendar section of Teams.
- Click the arrow next to + New meeting and select Live event.
- Give the event a name, choose a date & time and provide a description if you would like.
- Invite presenters and producers to the event
Roles and Responsibilities
What do we mean by presenters and producers? These are just two of the different types of roles in a live event. There are four roles in total – organisers, producers, presenters and attendees.
- Organisers: responsible for selecting event team members, deciding on the date and time, configuring event settings and distributing invitations to attendees.
- Producers: a live event has only one producer – they are responsible for starting and ending the event. The producer makes sure that the correct content is being shown to the audience at the right time. The producer can share their own screen, as well as presenters’ screens.
One person could be the organiser and producer – it doesn’t have to be two different people!
- Presenters: there can be multiple presenters. Each can share their audio and video during the event. They can also act as moderators during a Q&A.
- Attendees: the audience can be internal or external, depending on the type of event – (more on that to come!) Attendees can join the event via a link sent by the organiser, and can join either via the Teams app or a desktop browser. Public attendees can be anonymous or sign in with a Microsoft account. If they choose to be anonymous, they can still give a name that’s displayed next to any questions they ask.
Who is attending?
- Choose event permissions. The event can be open to:
People and groups: only specified people from your organisation can join
Org-wide: anyone in your organisation can join (sign-in required)
Public: the event is open to anyone. Choose this option if most attendees are outside your organisation.
- Choose how the event will be produced. You can do this in Teams or an external app. For the purposes of this, we will focus on producing in Teams.
You can decide if you want the recording to be sent to attendees following the event, you can generate an attendee engagement report and choose whether you would like a Q&A at any point.
- Once you’re happy with the settings click schedule.
Inviting attendees
Once your event is scheduled, it’s time for people to sign up! Send a link to attendees by email, text, instant message and more. At the moment, there isn’t a way of automatically adding Teams live events to an Outlook calendar, but it’s a feature we hope Microsoft add in the future.
You can send a calendar request to attendees or ask them to add it to their calendar so they don’t forget.
If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft Teams, get in touch with ACUTEC today.
