There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

E is for… (Live) Events!

It was tempting to write a whole blog post about emojis (possibly written with only emojis?!) But I wanted to explain what the difference is between a Teams Meeting and a Live Event, and what you might use each one for.

How is a Live Event different to a Teams Meeting?  

If you’ve attended a Teams meeting, you’ll know that it’s a collaborative space. Usually everyone attending can interact (or not) by:

• Turning on their camera
• Unmuting or muting themselves
• Sharing their screen
• Taking control of another screen share in progress
• Sending chat messages
• Adding to whiteboards
• Creating polls

… you get the idea. Everyone is ‘equal’ in the ways that they can contribute to the meeting. (Although the subject of actual meeting equality is a meaty one and not something I’m going to dive into today! Google it though – worth digging into.) Meetings are designed for everyone to collaborate.

On the other hand, a Live Event is much more geared towards a few people presenting to a large audience scenario, like an all-hands/company update/town hall – whatever else you’re calling your meeting that invites your whole company to attend.

If you’re presenting to a large audience, unlike a meeting you might not want people to:

• See the contact details of everyone else who is on the event, especially if attendees are outside of your organisation (for hopefully obvious GDPR nightmare reasons)
• Come off mute willy-nilly so that the presenter gets distracted by the sound of the attendee’s car/kettle boiling/dog barking
• Have the option to share their screen or request control of the screen share

You can make sure these things don’t happen with a Teams Live Event.

Sounds good but I bet they’re hard to set up

Setting up a Live Event is almost as easy as setting up a new meeting – in fact, the option to set up a live event lives as an option under the same button as ‘new meeting’:

Teams will walk you through the steps to set it up, from giving it the basic details like time, date, title description, to allowing external presenters (that means external to your organisation) or not:

You can set access permissions:

And options around enabling recording and Q&A (note that some of these permissions and options need to be enabled by IT):

And if you want to you can get really fancy about how you produce your Live Event:

Then you get an invite link that you can send out to invite people to attend:

Simple as that!

You may have spotted that I’m down as the ‘Producer’ and ‘Organizer’ for this event. For more detail on what this means I can do with and during the Live Event, as well as info on the type of licence you’d need to set one up – check out this Microsoft support page: Get started with Microsoft Teams live events – Microsoft Support   

Also – if you want to know more about what the attendee experience is for a Teams live event, this page is for you: Attend a live event in Teams – Microsoft Support

And for those of you who love a metric – you’ll be pleased to know that you can even download attendee reports for a Teams Live Event.

I hope this has given you food for thought if you currently run large present-to-many events, or are thinking about doing so in the future.

Next time we’re on F, which is for Files! (And I promise to make it more exciting than it sounds!)

Hope you’re enjoying the A-Z of Teams series. If you missed the earlier letters of the alphabet, you can find them here:

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/01/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-a-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/07/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/16/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-b-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/22/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-c-is-for-part-1/

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 2) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 3) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for (part 4!!!) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – D is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Happy Teamsing!