Enhanced webinars with Teams Premium – Overview

Let’s talk about the next set of features in Teams Premium – webinars. The latest features reshaped it significantly and right now it’s really a competitive webinar solution. Among the new features are enhanced presenter functions, a new attendees management process, and the addition of a “green room.” These new features aim to provide a professional and streamlined experience for both presenters and attendees. In this post, I will guide you through the process of configuring and enabling these new features. I will explain how presenters can leverage Teams to enhance their webinar experience.

Introduction

To start you need the Teams Premium license. You can enable a 30-day trial license and test it. You can find the detailed instruction in my previous post – Overview of the Teams Premium features.

The next step is to enable those new features using PowerShell.

1. Connect to Microsoft Teams

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

2. Turn on meeting registration (you need to replace <policy name> with your Teams meeting policy)

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity <policy name> -AllowMeetingRegistration $True

3. Activate the new webinar features

Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -AllowWebinars Enabled

4. Configure who can register for webinars

• Allow everyone, including anonymous users, to register for webinars

Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -EventAccessType Everyone

• Allow only users in your organization to register for webinars

Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -EventAccessType Everyone

Create and configure webinar

Let’s create a new webinar and go through new features.

1. When you create a new webinar the new details window is launched. There is a dedicated section for webinar options (1) and the Registration (2) configuration section.

• The Presenter bios section gives you more options to create a bio for your webinar presenters. You can add LinkedIn and Twitter profile URLs, website links, and a detailed bio.

• In the Theming section, you can specify a banner, logo, and theme color for the webinar.

• In the Configuration section, you can configure registration options.

Capacity – how many users can register (from 1 to 1000)

Require manual approval of all event registrations – if enabled all registered attendees must be manually approved, otherwise they won’t get a confirmation e-mail with a link to the webinar

Enable waitlist for this event – if the capacity is reached attendees can register to the waitlist and wait for a free spot.

Limit registration date – gives you control over the registration window

• Publish the site and check what it looks like. The page is refreshed and gives attendees all the required information. If the registration window is open and the capacity is not reached people can click on the Register button and fill out the form.

• If the capacity limit is reached and the Waitlist is enabled people can enter the wait-list.

Manage attendees

Manual approvals and the Waitlist are disabled by default, but if you enable them you get additional attendees control options.

1. Go to Registrations -> Attendees Status and review registered people. There are 5 sections:

• Pending approvals
• Waitlisted
• Rejected
• Registered
• Canceled

• In the Pending approval section, you can approve or reject a specific attendee. You can select multiple people at once. Keep in mind – once you approve someone, you cannot undo this change
• In the Wait-listed group, you can monitor people who joined the Wait-list. You can’t approve or reject them manually. If an attendee is rejected and free a slot, a wait-listed user will be moved automatically to the Pending approval group.

Meeting options

You can add more features to your webinar using the meeting options pane. There are 2 new features:

• Manage what attendees see
• Green room

Security options (Sensitivity labels, watermarks, and end-to-end Encryption) and meeting themes are not available in the webinar type.

Green Room

This is a lobby for webinars. You can join your webinar, prepare shared content, and chat with other presenters. When you’re ready you can start the webinar and let attendees see the webinar content.

It’s very similar to the Live Events lobby experience

If attendees join the webinar with Green Room enabled, they will get an introduction screen. When you start the webinar then the shared content will be available for them.

Manage what attendees see

This feature gives you the ability to control what is visible to attendees. By default, all content (even camera streams) is not visible, and attendees can see only a welcome screen. When you share a presentation, it will be visible to everyone but camera streams won’t be visible.

To show them you must manually click on each stream and bring it to the screen. No more distractions during the webinar – you can show only what you want.

Summary

With Teams Premium you can host and manage professional webinars. Registration options give you full control over when and how people can register. The approval process is great when you want to control who is approved and who’s not. Green room and limiting what’s available to attendees let you manage end users’ experience properly (no more distractions or tests on live). There are still some missing features (e.g., a post-webinar page with a summary) but Teams Premium features are the big leap forward.

Remember – you need to buy Teams Premium licenses only for webinar organizers!