5 Tips for organizing Live Events with Microsoft Teams

With Teams Live Events, you can schedule, produce, and broadcast meetings with up to 10,000 attendees (this default has been changed to 20.000 until July 1st). Think town halls, webinars, and other events that require scale and/or structured meetings. Attendees can watch the event live—or on demand—via desktop, web, or mobile devices. With the built-in Q&A manager, you and your production team can facilitate dialog and answer questions with your viewers. In addition, you can track attendance directly in Teams, including who watched and from what device.

In order to create Live Events you need to have to option enabled by your IT Admin, an Office365 Enterprise or Education license and you need to have Stream enable for your account. Your viewers only need to be granted permission to the event and can join anonymously if they want. They can join from a browser of from the Teams app.

Here are 5 tips for organizing Live Events with Microsoft Teams

1. Do dry runs or rehearsals.

Yes, practice makes perfect. I can advise all producers and presenters to do a few dry runs and practice how to use the tools you get in your role. During the dry runs you should emulate anything you want to do during your Live Events. This might include Q&A and screen sharing. This is also a great opportunity to test your network before the event.

Do not only explore what you can do as a producer and presenter, but also take a look at the producer environment, but also check out what your audience will see.

Remember, producers and presenters can only join their environments through the Teams app on their PC or MAC. All attendees can use whatever device or browser they prefer.

A Live Event can only be started once! So if you do any dry runs, do NOT dry run in the real Live Event. Once you close the Live Event, you cannot start it again.

2. Set up an event team.

Being a presenter and producer at the same time can be a hassle, especially when the pressure is on and you have 10,000 people watching you and expecting real magic to happen. My advice is to have at least 1 or 2 extra people on the Live Event who can help troubleshoot in case this is needed.

If you know that your network can be unreliable at times, consider having one person at another location to back you up if all fails. Know who is responsible for each step such as producing, presenting, moderating Q&A

3. Use a redirection URL service for attendee invites.

For Microsoft security is not an afterthought. One of the results is that the attendee URL is long, complicated and impossible to reproduce. Consider using a redirection service such as bit.ly to share shorter, more readable URLs.

An extra advantage is that if for some reason you need to set up new Live Event, you don't have to send a new link to all of your attendees, but instead just update the short URL.

4. Start Live Events early.

Start the Live Event 30 minutes ahead of time for the final equipment check. Also have a slide ready with a nice intro indicating the event will start soon and broadcast that slides 10 minutes ahead of time. Do mute all mics during those 10 minutes.

Presenters mute your notifications. If you are on Windows you can turn on Focus Assist to avoid bleeps, pongs and other sounds during your live event.

5. Start, delay, mute notification, audio and video.

Here are a couple of final important things to keep in mind: A broadcast by default is delayed by several seconds. Do not panic if you do not see anything happening during the first few seconds.

Audio is a very important part of a live event. Use certified audio equipment and avoid handheld microphones. During your dry run test your audio for possible feedback.

Turn on video! Try to use proper lighting, but also realize you can leverage HDMI as input for your capture device. These devices can also be used to capture PC or MAC output.

Don't forget to download the Live event resources afterwards. Simply go to Live event on your calendar in the Teams app and download those resources that you are interested in.

Final Remarks:

Are you interested in finding out how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is leveraging Live events for his monthly townhalls and employee Q&As? Check out Satya's Q&A Playbook.

If you are interested in how to even set-up a Teams Live Event, I suggest you start with the extensive video below.