Has anyone used Microsoft Teams Town Hall for a large event yet?

[karen_dredske]

I had a client who used the new Teams Town Hall feature to run a company town hall. They checked their network infrastructure in advance - including running several silent event simulation tests, setup Microsoft eCDN for all users, and did practice runs with the presenters. Everything was looking great until the day of the event (yesterday) when meeting organizers and presenters seem to have been doing fine, but the attendees had major problems connecting. In fact, most of them could not connect and about half of the attendees who had connected lost their connection. They were spread out in multiple locations and tried to use multiple browsers and even cell phones and were unsuccessful at joining the event. Everyone was on Classic Teams or connecting via phone app or browser.  Has anyone else tried this and had a successful experience? 

@Microsoft_Teams_team

[#2]

Following, as we start to test and prepare for the end of Live Event in late 2024.

[#3]

Karen, what was the date of the failure? There was a cosmos db failure on Nov 9th. The week before there was an eCDN failure.

[#4]

Hi Steve. The date was November 16th in the morning. So a week after the cosmos db failure and eCDN failure. . . unless there is a way to know if either of those occurred again the following week. So far. . . Microsoft support hasn't provided any usable information. They asked for logs and my client is still awaiting some kind of explanation of if there was a problem on the Microsoft side - which there had to have been given all the troubleshooting that went on during the event. However. . . the presenters didn't have any trouble presenting and they did end up with a great recording which they shared with everyone afterwards. However, it defeated the purpose of having a live event.

[#5]

@karen_dredske we also submitted tickets for related issues. Even with Premier support, we never seem to get any straight answers and are caught in an endless loop of requests for logs. It's no fun. I'll let you know if we hear anything useful.

[#6]

Thanks @SteveUlrichTE. What you described is the same thing I'm hearing from my client - no answers and requests for logs. Town Hall is a new offering so one could understand if there were issues. Honesty about it would go a long way to getting people to help with logs or whatever they need to help make sure the product works versus the frustration we all get from being kept in the dark.

[#7]

We have a Town Hall planned for Jan. 24. Due to issues you explained, we are considering running a trial Town Hall prior, recording the event and then stream "Live" as a Town Hall on the day of the event. Not really a virtual event but would allow for this failure. Last year we scheduled a Teams Live Event for a Town Hall, did lots of practicing and checking all the network. then on the day of the event had a mass failure. Couldn't present, attendees had major issues, wasn't even able to get a recording of the event. Microsoft did not provide any useful information about what happened or how to mitigate in the future. 

[#8]

@karen_dredske 

I have run one using 'Town Hall' with over 1,000 live attendees. Only issue we had was one presenter could not enter, and when we finally got them in, their video was not showing. Because of this, we have switched back to using Live Events until we do further testing. But I would feel comfortable running it via a Town Hall again. 

[#9]

We just ran a Town hall with over 700 attendees. We had an issue with iPhone users not being able to join. It would connect and then drop after about a minute. Happened over and over - no resolution. Adroid users didn't have issue. Did you use the Microsoft eCDN?

[#10]

Susan, there was a Teams service issue on January 26. Is that when you had your Town Hall?

[#11]

No our Town Hall was on Jan 24

[#12]

@JakeSully do you have to switch back to "old" teams to do live?  I was going to do that and it looked like I would hve to revert back. 

[#13]

There are certain things that it may try to open using old teams or even open it up via web browser., such as event settings. I would keep both old and new teams installed if you want to use Teams Live until it's gone.