For a long while now, Microsoft Teams has had an option for small meetings (Teams Meetings) and large events (Teams Live Events), but they have finally brought to the table something for the middle (Teams Webinars).
Teams Meetings are ideal for small internal or external events when you need a collaborative environment from all those involved.
Teams Live Events is ideal for large external facing events (think thousand participants) for when a group of people needs to present information to a large audience.
Teams Webinar seems to bring a nice balance of both these with allowing up to a thousand attendees while still allowing interactions from all those involved. As an added bonus it also includes the ability to set up a registration page for people to fill out and receive a calendar invite for the meeting.
To schedule a Teams Webinar, go to the “Calendar” section in teams and select “Webinar” from the dropdown list. From here you’ll be prompted to configure the webinar and fill in some blanks.
If you select the option to “Require registration” you can customize a Microsoft Forms page for users to fill out and then receive a calendar invite accordingly. The organizer of the meeting then has the ability to download a CSV file of those registered right from the meeting details inside of Teams.
Once the webinar is running, the presenter team has a special toolset at their disposal to make the webinar feel more polished and professional. First is PowerPoint Live; this allows a more enriched PowerPoint presentation where attendees can navigate through the content at their own pace and soon will allow them to translate slides on the fly. Next is Presenter Mode; this allows the presenter to share their video feed & content in several different formats.
We are excited to see Microsoft bring new features to Teams and are already planning on a selection of webinars to present using this new service so please keep your eyes open on our newsletters for those dates. If you are interested in hosting your own Microsoft Teams Webinar and would like help, please reach out and feel free to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter!