There are three types of meetings now available in Microsoft Teams with different features and functionality to help ensure you are having the best meeting experience for your scenario.

Teams Meetings

This is a typical Teams Meeting that is scheduled in your Teams calendar or Outlook. Anyone in the organisation can create these meetings and are used for general video conferencing.

• Teams meeting participants limit is 300
• Single meeting organiser
• Anyone can share audio, video and chat
• Cloud recordings
• Invite internal and external participants
• 1:1 or group video calls
• Meeting organiser can change meeting settings e.g. let all bypass lobby, allow meeting chat

Team Meetings are great for interactive group meetings or 1:1 meetings. These are the types of meetings we use in our day-to-day work.

Teams Webinars

Webinars in Teams can be created from the Teams calendar and are essentially the same as a Team meeting but with a few additional features:

• Can hold 1000 participants. More than 1000 participants can join the meeting but it will become view-only for those additional to the first 1000 that have joined
• Webinars comes with a registration form feature, allowing you to create and customise a registration form for all attendees
• Webinars allows attendees to appear on camera, unmute and ask questions which is more suitable to an event like a round table.

Webinars are great if you are looking to host an event with more than 300 people, but also want the session to be interactive. Attendees can go on camera, un-mute and ask questions/provide feedback. Some organisations prefer this for their all company events.

Live Events

Live Events is an extension of Teams Meetings enabling you to broadcast video and meeting content to a larger online audience. Live Events have different roles to help manage and produce the content to your audience.

• Organiser – Person who creates the event
• Producer – Host who schedules content, starts the event and ends the event
• Presenter – Presenters can share their video or screen to the audience

There are a few features that make a Live Event a great broadcasting tool:

• 10,000 attendee limit
• Attendees cannot see other attendees names or emails in the event
• Attendees cannot un-mute themselves
• Built-in Q&A panel which the Producer and Presenters can see and interact with
• You can set Live Events to automatically record content
• Attendees join via an attendee link
• Producer has control over shared content and can “queue” up content or video. See image below of Producer view:

Live Events are great if you are looking to host a large scale broadcast. Live Events can be used for public facing webinars, large town hall meetings or simply for sessions where you are looking to host more than 1000 participants.

Check out my blog on running an effective Teams Meeting for more tips and tricks.