RSMUS.comTeams Premium Mini-Series, Pt. 3:
There are many ways to host a live, virtual event in 2024. Microsoft has invested a significant number of resources to bring modern capabilities into Teams that allow for hosting any style of event. From meetings to webinars to town halls, there are various options. Today’s post will be rather lengthy but will detail the new features in Teams webinars and show how Teams Premium can improve the organizer and attendee experience.
Be sure to check out other posts related to Teams Premium features here:
RSM Tech Blog – Teams Premium Posts
Standard vs premium webinars – what’s included?
Think of Teams webinars as a more robust Teams meeting. Many of the options that are available with Teams meetings come standard with a webinar, with a slight twist. As a rule of thumb, Teams webinars are simply meetings with a registration website and a few more organizer tools!
Microsoft Teams webinars provide a structured and interactive platform for hosting virtual events. They offer tools to schedule events, manage attendee registration, run presentations, and analyze attendee data for effective follow-up. Webinars are more structured than ordinary meetings, with clear roles for presenters and attendees. Key features include registration settings like capacity limits, branded themes for custom events, presenter bios, and webinar reports for insights before and after the event. Organizers can schedule the webinar well in advance, decide whether the event will be public or private, prepare a registration form, and view registration insights before the event.
Teams premium webinars, on the other hand, offer additional features. These include the ability to create a webinar waitlist, limit the day and time when people can register, manage attendees’ view during an event, manually approve registrants, use RTMP-in, send reminder emails to registrants and set up a green room for webinar presenters. Teams premium also provides custom emails, allowing organizers and co-organizers to customize the webinar email templates sent to attendees. While Teams webinars are suitable for standard webinar needs, Teams premium webinars offer a more advanced and customizable solution.
Key items needed before event setup
When planning your virtual event, there are a few things to keep in mind when creating the best experience possible for attendees.
During the registration process – what information will need to be gathered from the audience? Items such as contact information, name of their organization, and roles or responsibilities are great examples of how to better inform presenters of whom they may be showcasing information. I always recommend adding a brief question and answer section to the registration form to get ideas generated on what else to discuss after the main content is presented.
When creating the event – where can your organization’s branding play a part? Be sure to prepare banner images, company taglines and logos as necessary when creating your webinar’s overall aesthetic.
Your presenters are important – what information can you include about the main act? A presenter may want to prepare their own bio. However, be sure to think about how you can best put a presenter in the webinar spotlight. Gathering contact information, backgrounds/experience and LinkedIn pages are a few examples of how you can help promote speakers and the event as a whole.
Building the event
Now that we have gathered our prerequisites, it’s time to put our tools into action and start to create our event.
Setup
First head to your Teams calendar and begin to create your webinar under the New meeting drop-down and select Webinar. From the details menu enter the key information such as time and date, the description/agenda for the event and the list of presenters. It is strongly encouraged to add at least one other co-organizer to your event, ensuring the webinar ship doesn’t have a lone sailor!
During initial setup, you can also create presenter bios and add in your organization’s brand/theme and set up your meeting options.
*A note on meeting options: if you need to have anonymous attendees and need to control exactly what attendees can see on a screen – a Teams Premium license will be required! The default experience will look similar to a Teams meeting, with users being able to see shared content and presenters on a single screen – with managing what attendees see, you could have only content display without presenters, and vice versa.
Registration
From the registration menu, you can configure items such as the maximum capacity of attendees for a webinar (default will always be 1,000), the registration form and keep track of who has registered within the attendee status menu.
Creating a registration form is one of the key features of a Teams webinar, providing organizers the opportunity to gather information about their audience before an event starts. This is where we will use any questionnaire items that were gathered before we began the setup for the event.
Customization/Theming
Incorporate your organization’s brand to your webinar within the theming menu. Here is where we can use any banner images, logos and colorways associated with your organization. This theme will come across the registration website and any emails sent out to attendees, presenters and co-organizers.
Within the Emails tab, you can preview and customize all the communication emails sent to those attending the event. This is a great opportunity to personalize and add your organization’s taglines into announcements that might otherwise be a more generic update to an event.
Another feature of Teams premium is the addition of custom organization branding across the entire Teams platform. To learn more about this feature, check out a previous blog post here: Teams Premium Miniseries, Pt. 2: All About Your Brand…
Now that we have set up our webinar, and customized the attendee registration experience, remember to Publish your event to allow registration to begin!
*Above is an example of what a published registration website will look like!
Managing the Event
Once the time has finally come to host the webinar, there are a few things to keep in mind as an organizer and presenter. Below are a few tips and tricks for critical items to consider before, during and after the event.
Pre-Host
Webinar/meeting options can be changed before the event starts – confirm that the appropriate settings have been applied to your event before going live. The Q&A section is highly encouraged when hosting webinars, and if an organization wants Q&A to be anonymized, be sure to apply monitoring settings before the webinar starts!
Post-Host
There are a handful of items to view after your event is over. Teams provide reports on the webinar that include a list of people registered and who attended, total view time for attendees, and a few other bits of helpful information on the general insights of the event.
A recording of the webinar can also be found after the event is finished. Head to the Recordings tab to view the recording and publish the recording to the original registration website for all attendees to view. By default, webinar recordings will be saved to the primary organizer’s OneDrive.
Enabling the presenter and co-hosts
Green Room
Teams now provides a space to meet before the main event starts. The virtual Green Room is a meeting within the meeting if you will! Meet with organizers and presenters, review content, change meeting options, configure the Q&A and other applications, and much more before starting the event. To go-live, select the Start meeting yellow icon and you are off to the races!
Managing what attendees see
As organizers, you can control exactly what an attendee can see on their screen. If there is a specific point in the event where certain content needs to be highlighted, you can add and remove different views of presenters and content to make a more engaging webinar. This feature is one of the more prominent components of the Teams premium webinar experience – enabling full control of what can/cannot be seen by your audience.
As you can see, each box of content is outlined in red, indicating what attendees can see on their screen, and this can be managed via the organizer/co-organizer of the webinar. Think of this as a handy MC tool for a host of an event, you can now control exactly what displays on the screen, multiple presenters, specific screens of content, or nothing at all!
You may also notice that we are using PowerPoint live to present content, which is another great feature that comes with Teams – and no premium license is needed!
In summary
The Teams webinar experience is jam-packed with features and Teams premium adds even more to your events. By utilizing tools such as anonymous audiences, managing viewer’s screens and various registration customization options, you can take your Teams webinars to the next level.
There are a significant amount of materials to consider when hosting a virtual event, and Teams premium adds even more tools to an organizer’s toolbelt. Microsoft continues to add more features to meetings and webinars as the collaboration platform evolves – be on the lookout for more exciting additions soon!
More info on Teams webinars and other premium webinar features
Overview of Teams meetings and live events – Check out the premium vs standard feature comparison!
Get started with Teams webinars
Contact us
To reach out to Kaleb Dombeck or another RSM team member to learn more about Teams live events, Teams premium, or Microsoft 365, please use our bookings link.
Kaleb Dombeck
Kaleb is a Microsoft Adoption Trainer within the RSM Modern Work team. He has a focus in bringing Microsoft Teams and Power Platform solutions to clients and assisting end-users with embracing these new transformations.