Webinars in Microsoft Teams

Teams webinars are currently rolling-out to Microsoft 365 tenants, and feature landed to one of my tenants early this week.

With Teams webinars you can host interactive webinars for up to 1000 attendees. After 1000 attendees are reached, new joining attendees are automatically joined in view-only broadcast mode, which supports attendees up to 10,000. Teams Webinars support common Teams meeting controls, presentation options, chat, reactions and meeting apps. Webinars are adding custom registration pages and invite emails for attendees. Attendees can unmute, open their camera, raise hands, use reactions and use the chat, like in the standard Teams meeting.

Tenant-wide setting for controlling and enabling webinars

Webinars can be controlled with Teams meeting policies and webinars are also following current policy configuration.

• If scheduling private meetings is disabled, users cannot create webinars
• If anonymous join is disabled, public webinars can be created but anonymous logins will fail
• If engagement reports are disabled, information about who joined the webinar is not recorded
• SharePoint lists are also required for webinars

Enabling registration for everyone requires a policy change and setting WhoCanRegister to “Everyone”. You can check the value on your Teams meeting policies with

Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy | Select Identity, WhoCanRegister

And change is to correct setting with

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -WhoCanRegister Everyone

If you need to control webinars settings for specific users, create a new meeting policy and assign those users to it.

Creating a new webinar

New webinar dialog is almost identical to new meeting dialog. You can fill out basic information for the webinar, invite presenters and use Scheduling Assistant for picking up required and optional presenters from your organization.

Registration form

Registration form is a new feature for Teams webinars. With registration setting you can control is registration required, options are None, For people in you org and guest and For everyone.

Registration form can be customized. Registration form contains basic details of the events, speakers with short bios, by default first name, last name and email. More fields can be added from pre-configured fields and it’s possible to add custom text fields and choice fields as well. There is a placeholder for header image.

Registration link to be shared with attendees can be found on registration for customization view.

When attendees register to the event they see your customized form and will receive a confirmation email with webinar join link.

When registration is enabled, organizer can follow-up registration by downloading an Excel report of the registered attendees from the meeting details view.

Webinar settings

By default webinar gets specific setting

• Lobby: Only invited people can bypass the lobby
• Presenters: Only invited presenter are able to present
• Attendees are muted by default
• Meeting chat is enabled for during webinar
• Reactions are enabled

If you edit the webinar and add more presenters, they are not automatically added to selected presenters to the webinar. Use meeting options before the webinar or promote them when the webinar is started. You can, of course, change meeting settings during the webinar as well.

For engaging attendees, Meeting apps, like Forms, are also available for webinars. Apps can be added to the webinar from Teams calendar view.

Hosting a webinar

Before the webinar

• Check meeting options
  • Lobby: how do you want attendees to join in
  • Presenters: who is presenting or are you promoting presenters during the webinar
  • Are attendees muted by default
  • Is chat going to be used
  • Are reactions in use
• Add needed apps and prepare content, for example your polls
• Send short guidance or have meeting with other presenters about how are you running the webinar, timeslots for speakers, audience engagement, how chat is used and who is moderating it, and how content is shared

When the webinar is starting

• Join in 10 minutes beforehand to check out sound, camera, apps and presentation. Advise also other presenters to do so
• Decide when you want to let attendees in and do you want to control the lobby, change lobby settings accordingly

During the webinar

• Use hand raises, reactions, chat and apps for engaging the audience
• If audience is allowed to ask questions, guide them to use hand raises to indicate the they have a question and give them turns. You can unmute all attendees or just specific attendee.
• Prepare at least some polls to engage the audience and for asking feedback
• Use spotlighting

Attendance report will be available on the meeting chat after the meeting.

Afterword

Registration features of the Teams Webinars are really needed addition, when running interactive presentations. Options and form customization is easy and simple and basic reporting capabilities are already there. We are all familiar running Teams meetings, so catching up with webinars is simple.