Expanded webinar capabilities are coming to Microsoft Teams—soon. What’s the difference between a webinar and a live event and what can you expect with the imminent release? Our blog has you covered with all the details.

Host Webinars with Up to 1,000 Attendees

Microsoft Teams updates will support interactive webinars with up to 1,000 attendees harnessing content-rich presentation options and host controls, including PowerPoint live. PowerPoint live enables presenters to seamlessly run their event on Teams while presenting. With PowerPoint Live, now presenters will have total control of their content—with the ability to review notes, chats, slides, and see your audience in a single-panel view.

Presenters can also empower a more seamless transition between team members when there are multiple presenters. Co-presenters can quickly hand off presenting abilities without having to have outside producers manage slide movement or manage the presentation.

With Presenter Mode, teams can customize how their video and content appear to their audience while enabling them with face-to-face recognition to focus on non-verbal cues that keep presentations interactive and impactful.

And with the latest Live Reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings, all attendees can share their reactions in real-time with—you guessed it—an assortment of emojis to promote engagement and interaction.

Microsoft Teams Webinars enable users to:

• Conveniently schedule and deliver 1,000-person webinars with Microsoft Teams
• Eliminate distractions with the ability to disable attendee sound and video
• Leverage interactive features like chat, polls, and reactions.

The Microsoft Teams webinar capabilities make it simple to create event registration/sign-up pages. By default, the registration feature will allow anyone at your organization to register for or create a Teams webinar. Microsoft recommends setting the AllowEngagementReport policy to true.

Once live, all users will be able to schedule a new webinar.

Teams will honor any existing meeting policies enabled within your organization, and according to Microsoft:

• If allow scheduling private meetings is turned off, then users will not be able to schedule webinars.
• When anonymous join is disabled for the tenant, users can schedule a public webinar but it will fail on join.
• SharePoint lists are required in order to set up webinars. To set this up, learn more here: Control settings for Microsoft Lists

Live Events are the Standard for Large Events

Live Events will still be the standard for mass attendance. If your webinar grows to over 1,000 attendees in total, Teams can seamlessly switch to a Live Event to accommodate a 10,000-attendee view-only broadcast.