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 through our end-to-end events platforms, whether one-to-one meetings or large one-to-many hosted digital events. We introduced our new digital streaming event solution for large events, town hall, in September 2023. Town hall has continued to drive new, exciting experiences for our customers, such as the ability to bring multiple presenters on stage, send out attendee emails, and see real-time health analytics for the event. As we move forward, we are excited to continue to share our latest features with you and let you know what to expect from town hall in the next year.
Additionally, we will not retire Teams Live Events in September 2024, as previously announced. Town hall will continue to be the platform where our new features and value land, and we encourage Teams Live Events users to take advantage of these new innovations by upgrading to town hall when ready. We’ve spoken with customers and understand how important it is to ensure a smooth transition to town hall. We are committed to making it as easy and beneficial as possible for customers to experiment, adopt, and implement town hall as their destination for large-scale digital events, as well as allow customers to upgrade from Live Events to town hall on their own schedule. In the coming days, customers who are still using Teams Live Events, and wish to continue to do so past September 30th, 2024, will be able to schedule Teams Live Events instances beyond this date.
Updates about features that will be rolling out to town hall can be found on our town hall adoption page, and we will communicate future updates about Teams Live Events plans via blogs, MC posts, and any other forums where this announcement is distributed.
Town hall innovations deliver new ways to engage your audience
Town hall adoption continues to grow as we continue to prioritize driving new value for our users. In the last quarter, we saw significant increases in new customers trying town hall, total usage, and the number of hosted events. Our mission is to continue to add new additional capabilities to town hall that make your streaming digital events more impactful to audiences and more seamless to execute. As we look ahead to the coming year, we will be delivering key features to continue to build on the highly engaging and interactive experiences that town hall delivers. Attendees will soon be able to express their feedback and engagement through live reactions, streaming chat and presenters can interact with their audience via raise hands. Advanced production experiences such as the producer role, queuing shared content and preview scene support are also coming to town hall, providing a new level of event execution capabilities.
When we initially announced town hall in September of 2023, we made our users aware that we would continue to release town hall features that provide a similar experience in town hall as Teams Live Events. In the next twelve months, we plan to continue to focus on these areas in town hall to ensure that we provide the same feature effectiveness that customers have come to expect from Teams Live Events. Some key features that will be available in town hall in the next year to help achieve this effectiveness include:
- Engagement capabilities (certain Q&A functions: voting, filters, sorting, and archive questions; export questions to CSV\download Q&A report)
- Device capabilities (MTR-W support for presenters and attendees and CVI and VDI support)
- Advanced production experiences such as producer role, queuing shared content, and preview scenes.
The combination of ease of use and adoption of town hall, achieving feature effectiveness between the Live Events and town hall, and the new additive value that is exclusive to town hall going forward are all great reasons for current Live Events users to consider upgrading to town hall to take advantage of what we are building.
For the latest updates, feature timelines, and news about what is coming for Teams town hall, please visit our town hall adoption page.