Best Practices for External Presenters in your Teams Live Event
Published Nov 19 2020 11:29 AM 45.8K Views
Microsoft

4d7cb614-15d2-4440-8ae7-0d248e4306c5.png

 

Many of my customers have reached out to me recently about this situation: they are organizing a Teams Live Event, they have presenters that are outside of their organization, and those external presenters are only able to join the event as attendees. Sound familiar?

 

Good news! I run webcasts constantly with presenters outside of the Microsoft tenant, and I avoid this confusion completely. Just proactively follow the three steps below for smooth sailing with your events:

 

1. Add the external presenter as a guest to a team.

No, it doesn't matter what team! It doesn't even matter if you add them to an existing team or a new team. In fact, I often create a sample team for a new event, and then delete that team after the event. Anyone with a business or consumer email account (Outlook, Gmail, others) can participate as a guest in Teams. Never added a guest to a team before? Here is a step-by-step guide on adding guests to a team.

 

2. Let the presenter know that they need to accept the guest invitation and join the team.

Even if you add them as a guest to your Teams tenant and they receive an email, the most important part is that they step through the entire flow. This ensures that the external presenter is authenticated as a guest within your tenant. Below is an example of an email that I sent to my guest presenters just last week! Feel free to save yourself time and use it as a template:

example.PNG

 

3. Schedule the live event and add the guest as a presenter in the event group.

When you schedule a live event, the first screen asks for the meeting title, date and time, and other details including the event group. Simply add in the presenters' email addresses to add them to the event group as shown below:sample1.PNG

 

After you invite the presenter, they will be added to the event group, as you shown here:

sample2.PNG

This can be done before step 1, and you can add more presenters to your event group at any time. That being said, until the external user goes through the flow to authenticate as a guest in your tenant (step 2), they will not be able to join the live event as a presenter.

 

That's it, folks! Hopefully this simplifies the process of inviting external guests to present in your live events. For even more details on planning live events in Microsoft Teams, check out this resource

 

Thanks and let us know how else we can help, 

 

0.jfif

Sam Brown, Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist

 

15 Comments
Iron Contributor

Hi Samantha,

 

Nice overview, I posted earlier a similar: https://williamvanstrien.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-include-external-as-presenter-in.html
A difference is that of the first step to add the presenter to a Teams in your tenant. This is not per se required, but what is required is that the presenter to join the Teams Live Event (via the internal meeting) must have switched in Teams to the organizing tenant. And the step 1 suggested by you is an approach that enables to switch in Teams App to organizing tenant.


One alternative approach is to explicit invite the external within the started internal “production” meeting. This is actually also (and the only) approach to include external presenters in Yammer Live Event: https://williamvanstrien.blogspot.com/2020/05/how-to-include-external-as-presenter-in_31.html

 

For both Teams and Yammer Live Events holds that including an external presenter is only possible with Teams production. With “external app” it is current not possible, due this is produced via Microsoft Stream which in the current “classic” edition does not support guest access. Once “new” Stream delivered and all Live Events consolidated on same platform this limitation is expected to be resolved.

Copper Contributor

Good service

Deleted
Not applicable

Thanks Samantha for the detailes guide, I'll try it out soon!

@sambrown One question: is it really required to add the guest to Teams team or is it enough to ensure that she has guest account (that could be made in multiple ways, i.e. directly via AAD portal)?

Microsoft

Hey @Deleted sure thing! You are right, they simply need to be authenticated as a guest in your tenant. When I explain it to customers, adding them as a guest to a Team is the easiest way to ensure they fully authenticate (if they comment in the Team, you know that they made it through the flow).

Deleted
Not applicable

I've managed to test it finally... Well, it does work but I would have certainly given up if not this article. It took me half an hour to get through, and I don't believe that an average person will manage it without qualified IT guy behind their shoulder. Considering how easiliy one can invite a co-host on an alternative webinar platform, there's absolutely no way for Teams Live Event in this scenario until Microsoft gets it to the next level of usability.

 

Nevertheless, I appreciate your effort @sambrown in attempt to make our experience a bit better here. Let's just hope that our collective feedback gets heard, and we get something a bit more user friendly.

Copper Contributor

I just noticed that this option to Allow eternal presenters is now available. Looks like there's no need to add them in a Team anymore?

avavee_1-1616679390126.png

 

Microsoft

Yes! We were waiting for this feature :)

Copper Contributor

Where is this option? I can't see it anywhere. Is it when you set up a Teams Live Event?

Copper Contributor

@hudmb Yes, you will see this option in the are where you would normally add the presenters/producers. I have Microsoft Teams Version 1.4.00.7174 (64-bit), in case this is not yet available to all.

Copper Contributor

How odd. I have this version and cannot see this. I just see the standard setup screen where you invite presenters, but no box that asks about external presenters: 

 

hudmb_0-1617003754371.png

 

Deleted
Not applicable

It might be related to the back-end configuration as well. We don't have this either so I assume that it's being rolled out right now.

BTW, has anyone seen a description of what that option really means? It's already possible to invite external presenter who is using Teams, it works just fine. And even non-Teams presenter can be brought it, after some ritual dances :) So how does this new option affect the join experience for external presenters?

Copper Contributor

@vadimp It says that external presenters need to be admitted in the lobby. So, I guess this is same step when we use the regular MS Teams meeting when external users pop up when they join with the option to admit or not. I would know by Apr 12 when I get to try this out in one of our events.

Copper Contributor

Yes, it is currently possible...but that person has to be invuted to a Team prior to the event and register for a Microsoft account if they don't have one. It's a VERY clunky process and one I won't repeat until it gets more streamlined. There's nothing elegant about inviting a guest presenter to a Teams Live event at the moment. Even if you follow the steps, some external presenters are only let in as delegates. It's all so confusing.

Copper Contributor

Hi, it's possible to organize a sort of check-in with a pre-registration to the event?

Deleted
Not applicable

@SimoneSimoncini Not yet but it's coming soon. For the time being you could use a simple Forms form, having the event link sent as custom response.

Version history
Last update:
‎Nov 19 2020 12:15 PM
Updated by: