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External presenter can't join live-event after it started?

Brass Contributor

Is this a bug or a known problem?

A collegue of mine was invited to give a presentation on a project in a different Tenant (Let's call it Organisation B). 

The live-event was hosted by Organisation B, the organisation had multiple presenters each giving a presenation every 30 minutes. My collegue was second in line to give a presentation, when she wanted to join the live-event 5-10minutes before it was her turn. The connection kept failing, giving an error after 1-2minutes saying she couldn't make connection.

 

Since we also host live-events regularly, I wanted to make sure what the cause of this problem would be. 

 

If it isn't possible (as a presenter) to join after the live-event started, why isn't it?

 

Thanks in advance for any replies!

 

*Since this wasn't on my computer and the live-event is already over, I can't share any screenshots.* 

18 Replies

@wo_kn Hi, as far as I know that shouldn't be any problem (at least I haven't heard about it before). What about taking a closer look at the user experiencing this as you mentioned connection problems. Maybe there's a network, location or computer issue causing the issue. I mean, does it happen regularly or only on this particular occasion?

 

I am attaching the recommended procedure in case you're interested.

 

For a guest to present in a live event, do the following:

  1. Add the user as a guest to a team.
  2. Have the user accept the guest invitation and join the team.
  3. Schedule the live event and add the guest to your event group.

"As a best practice, we recommend that you create a channel for producers and presenters of the live event so they can chat and share information before the event. Guests who don't have Microsoft 365 credentials won't see the Calendar in Teams. To make it easy for them to join the event, producers can post the event link to the channel. Presenters can then open Teams, go to the channel, and then click the link to join the event."

@ChristianBergstrom  

Thank you for your reply!

The live-event which was hosted by the above-mentioned 'organisation B', wasn't created in a Team. This was created by the button in the calendar. Since not only my collegue had a problem joining the live-event but also another external presenter, it seems most unlikely this was due to network/computer/ location problem.

I'll be at the office tomorrow and will try recreating this problem with a second computer and keep you up to date.

 

As far as I know, an external presenter doesn't have to be a guest in the hosting-tenant to be able to present in a live-event. We hosted multiple live-events without adding the external presenters as guest in our Tenant.

 

Thanks in advance.

@wo_kn Well, to be fair you didn't provide all that info in your first post. As for the "recommended procedure" it was just a copy/paste from the MS docs with the quoted text. Anyway, hope you get it sorted and feel free to update this conversation when you know more about it.

@ChristianBergstrom 

So I just tested all morning with a second computer. I used 2 external e-mails (both Microsoft Accounts) to get them as a presenter in the live-event. (Atleast so I hoped)

I created a live-event from my calendar in the Teams-app. I invited both e-mails (I added one of those in a Team to have it as guest our the tenant) 

When trying to open the invites as presenter, every attempt on both MS accounts at opening the invites failed. I've tried log in in to the Teams-app first, log in after,... The only thing which worked is to just view the live-event as a participant.

I guess this doesn't work because those accounts don't own a license to present/ produce a live event?

 

After this I tried inviting an account which is in our Tenant to make it join after the live-event has started, this didn't seem to give any problems as I could just join. 

 

I don't own an account which has the license to either present or produce live events which also is outside of our tenant. 

 

 

 

@wo_kn Hi, and thanks for the update. I think it's better if I just direct you to this conversation as I believe it will answer your additional questions https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/guest-presenter-in-live-meetings/m-p/1274601

 

 

@ChristianBergstrom Funny, we just attempted to run a Microsoft Live event and ran into almost the same situation. We have run several Live events and not had this issue.

We had created a calendar invite in Outlook (as the Microsoft Live docs show) embedded the link into a an email that was forwarded to the presenter. When it came time to run the event, the other presenter/producers could get in, but the 'external' presenter could not. They see the 'event hasn't started yet' screen, which implies they have been brought in as an attendee, even though they have a presenter link. 

Almost giving up now on using Microsoft for webinars/events.

@Paul McDevitt We gave up on Live-events for now, as it is pretty confusing for attendees to join the Live-event (MS pushing them to log in to a MS account which gets confused with the login they have on our website, the "join anonymously"-option is a bit hidden). Instead we started working with normal meetings which have progressed quite a bit since. This will only work for you sub 100 participants since normaal meeting often have some trouble if you go above 100 (chat not showing up,...)

You can assign people roles inside a meeting which makes it easier to set up a meeting.

 

Hope you can figure out a solution!

Thanks for the feedback. In this case these are customers that we are inviting, so we don’t want them showing up in the video or ‘participating’ other than watching the speakers and asking questions in the Q&A we will pick up and have the speakers address. We want the ability to mute all the external attendees from the beginning and we don’t want the attendees to to see a list of who all the other attendees are - they might be from competitors. We were using Microsoft Live as we also sell Microsoft 365 and other solutions that integrate to it. But it seems it is not ready for prime time as anything but an internal organization tool

@Paul McDevitt Hello, let me ping @Linus Cansby who is an expert in Teams live events.

 

Linus, you have a lot more experience from live events so I'm inviting you to participate in the conversation, perhaps you can provide some "best practices" when it comes to external users? (other than the docs suggestions). I really don't have time to dig into this topic right now :)

 

Cheers!

@wo_kn @Paul McDevitt Have you seen this addition? Just noticed it and thought about this conversation.

 

"Anonymous Presenter Support for Live Events - Rolling out"

Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

I hadn’t but not sure it is addressing the intended use of Microsoft Live. I guess the real question is whether it is intended primarily for internal events or to be used as a general purpose Webinar tool. At the recent Ignite, one of the sessions (and post event blogs) suggested recent changes have made Microsoft Live ready for prime time as a webinar tool. From my personal experience this is not true. It is missing some key capabilities like presenting a custom screen to attendees so they know exactly what event they have joined that has not yet started (we see high drop off when people join and see the generic screen), the ability to track who has come to the event. (The join anonymously is the easiest for them to join but then we don’t know who has joined.) the inability to promote a speaker from the attendee list. We need to invite external presenters easily and without tenant related issues. (Even internal events often include a guest speaker.) Remember, most people join right on the time or just after the time specified. This doesn’t leave a lot of time to overcome any issues that we run into. My experience with WebEx Events, GoTo Webinar events is that we run into none of these issues. The pronto have is that as long as Microsoft (and key influencers) pass off Microsoft Live as a mainstream webinar tool my CEO wants us to use it. So we continue to run into issues that are explained away as the organizers incompetence and not shortcomings in the tool.
best response confirmed by ThereseSolimeno (Microsoft)
Solution

@Paul McDevitt 

 

External Presenters are now much easier to handle, I made a video demo of it today

 

 

What Microsoft call Webinars is also coming soon, and isn't related to Live Events but regular meetings. As meetings will soon allow 1000 attendees with an overflow to 10,000 viewers we don't need to use a Live Event in order to achieve scale, it's more of an choice whether you need the production experience. Maybe required for an all company broadcast, but not for what most of us would call a webinar. Meetings already have plenty of capabilities for attendee and presenter roles (including promotion), audio mute, video mute, reactions, raise hands etc. etc.

The feature being called Webinars is really meeting registration, you can create a sign-up page where people can register for your meeting and then they receive an actual invite. There's then some kind a connection between the registered people and who attended. It's due by End May.

@Paul McDevitt Hello, my intention with the previous reply was just a heads-up as it's rolling out now. When it comes to Teams Live Events I'm not the member who should reply to be honest. I know pretty much about Teams except Live Events. That's why I tried to ping Linus earlier but people are busy with their day-to-day jobs so sometimes you just have to go via the official channels to get in touch with the experts in the Microsoft support.

 

About the webinars and the other associated features they are all scheduled for April/May!

Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

@Steven Collier thanks. This actually answers a couple of things I noticed vis-a-vis the GUID. We suspect someone shared a link as we had three of four coming into the 'lobby' which surprised us (clearly had a presenter link shared.) But also the confusion over using the Microsoft Download vs Join by web. We had actually told everyone to use the latter - including presenters. Perhaps that was part of our issue. 

We don't want these people to be guests of our tenant for sure. Especially when it is to be a one-off guest presenter. It sounds like we are part way there now with these changes.

BTW do you know if it is possible to reduce the attendee delay? Right now it is set to an inordinately long time. If at the end of the presentation someone asks if the audience has questions please pop into the Q&A, there could be a very pregnant pause. We put notes into the Q&A and usually have a 'seed' question ready to fill the gap but it does seem like an unnecessarily long delay.

Thanks

 

Thanks. I get that. It seems the Microsoft Live is a rarely understood feature. We have been using for 6+ months to run events. We run into different issues or have been reviewing the capabilities comparing to other platforms. I notice I generally get shot down by those who don't actually use it much (as a defence of Microsoft 365.) We sell Microsoft 365 (our experience mostly on the voice side) so we have a vested interest in it working well, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out where it is not fit for purpose. As in, don't represent it as a webinar event tool for public audiences if it is primarily a large enterprise internal tool, for example.
Anyway, this forum has been one of the few to take these questions seriously and offer real answers or help. So thanks for that.

@Paul McDevitt The delay is how long it takes Azure Media Services to render the video into different resolutions for the adaptive streaming, there's nothing that can be done about it.

 

Do these need to be live events at all though, why won't a regular meeting do? They soon will scale in the same way and offer lots of recent controls over attendees vs presenters. No delay either.

Thanks for the answer as to the reason for the delay.
As to the need to use Live events, I think we have been around this one before. In a regular Teams meeting, everyone can be visible to everyone else. I can see a list of all attendees. Chat is visible to all, etc. If you are running an event to, say, customers or prospects or some group that you do NOT want to see or know about each other - perhaps they are competitors in the same industry - the only way to do it is to use Microsoft Live.

@Paul McDevitt Understood. You can turn off Meeting Chat for a specific call today, but I'm pretty sure the roadmap will help resolve these other requirements over the rest of this year. 

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by ThereseSolimeno (Microsoft)
Solution

@Paul McDevitt 

 

External Presenters are now much easier to handle, I made a video demo of it today

 

 

What Microsoft call Webinars is also coming soon, and isn't related to Live Events but regular meetings. As meetings will soon allow 1000 attendees with an overflow to 10,000 viewers we don't need to use a Live Event in order to achieve scale, it's more of an choice whether you need the production experience. Maybe required for an all company broadcast, but not for what most of us would call a webinar. Meetings already have plenty of capabilities for attendee and presenter roles (including promotion), audio mute, video mute, reactions, raise hands etc. etc.

The feature being called Webinars is really meeting registration, you can create a sign-up page where people can register for your meeting and then they receive an actual invite. There's then some kind a connection between the registered people and who attended. It's due by End May.

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