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Microsoft Teams Blog
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Updates for Town Hall in Microsoft Teams and Teams Live Events

DrewBlundell's avatar
DrewBlundell
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May 28, 2024
Our goal in Teams is to make hybrid work and communication easier and more inclusive than ever before. This pursuit is core to the effort we put into creating meaningful connections between people th...
Updated May 24, 2024
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rbell14's avatar
rbell14
Brass Contributor
Jun 18, 2024

Finally happy to see "Additionally, we will not retire Teams Live Events in September 2024, as previously announced." and I also see some of my biggest issues with Town Halls being addressed, (Managing Content, and the managing of presenters), The issues I currently have with Town Halls are:

1 - Unable to manage content ( coming soon  I believe , When ? ) 

2 - Unable to END a Town Hall for Attendees without ending the Town Hall for the Presenters - we always have a debrief discussing Q&A results, attendee numbers, general discussion about the content etc   and then leave. ( Is this on the Roadmap, if so, When )

3 - Often we have 15+ Presenters ( not all cameras on at the same time) but in old Teams I was able to scroll through the list and quickly pick the presenters I want to display, now its tabbed, it takes a long time to find, click through, select and display the presenter,  I know I can use pinning, but I need to do it quickly. so I need a better solution,  ( note that this is also a problem in Teams Live Events using NEW Teams ( OLD Teams is fine ) 

4 - I use NDI to productionize the look and feel of an event / town hall,,  NDI fails if you don't have the presenter on the organizers screen ( can only have 4 at any one time ) if I scroll to check other presenters, NDI Freezes the stream to the production box - There are other scenarios that cause NDI is now untrusted until these anomalies are is fixed.

 

Regardless of the issues Im having, Town Halls are slowly getting to where I expect them to be, The early release of Town Halls and the BETA nature of it till now has caused a certain amount of stress, really need better roadmap with timing.

I have played with using RTMP to bring content into a Town Hall, but the NDI is so flakey its unusable unless I only have 4 presenters, ( due to the freezing when moving to other presenters)

I know I can run another meeting, productionize it and feed it into a Teams Town Hall,, but then the presenters don't have access to the Q&A and if NDI Fails I don't have a backup using the Town Hall features.

My normal attendee numbers usually vary between 2500 and 7500, so I would rather not have problems 🙂

 

Regards  Richard