Worktank has been a power-user of Microsoft Teams meeting tools from the first beta release, helping many of our clients move their All-Hands, Town halls, and Senior Leadership meetings to the platform. Teams enables both low-friction virtual events, and high production-value workflows, and Worktank is all-in on the platform for connecting internal, distributed teams.
In our work, we are often asked questions about the different meeting types within Microsoft Teams: Meetings and Live Events. This post hopes to give a high-level overview of Microsoft Teams and highlight the capabilities and limitations of both meeting types.
Microsoft Teams Overview
Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool for connecting and engaging with your team. Along with providing conversation threads, chat features and collaborative file sharing, Teams provides a platform for large group meetings, such as All-Hands or Town Halls.
When creating new meetings, two choices are available: Teams Meetings or Teams Live Events.
Teams Meetings
Teams Meetings are designed for real-time collaboration and conversation between a group of peers. Currently, a Teams Meeting is limited to a total of 250 people on the call. Attendees can share webcam video, create a whiteboard, or share out their desktop. Invitations can be sent to individuals or teams of people.
With so many attendee participation tools available, Teams Meetings are best used for smaller, collaborative efforts, rather than a structured one-to-many presentation.
Teams Live Events
Teams Live Events are designed for presentation style meetings, where most attendees are “view only”. With this version of Teams, up to 10,000 attendees can join the event, but can only participate via text-based Q&A.
The standard Live Event mode allows multiple, virtual presenters who can share audio, webcams and their screens to present content. There are some limitations to presenter controls, and all initiations must be sent prior to the meeting start time (no adding attendees during the meeting … yet).
For meetings that are taking place in a larger room and are being captured using a professional video production crew, there is an “external” mode that can be enabled. This mode allows the transmission of high-quality video using professional broadcast-level tools. While this mode allows for high-quality video, it brings limitations. All presenters must be in the same location as the video crew.
Yammer Integration
If your organization uses Yammer, Teams Live Events also can be embedded into a Yammer page. This allows for great discoverability, as well as the ability to have a running Yammer thread accessible by all viewers.
Microsoft Teams Assistance
Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform, and Worktank is excited about the experiences it can empower. We stand ready to help your organization take advantage of the full value of the platform.
To learn more about making the move to Microsoft Teams to engage with your clients and colleagues, contact us or call (206) 254-0950
