Town Hall feedback

Copper Contributor

Hi there,

 

We're hurtling towards our first high-level Town Hall and I have a few concerns.

 

The Q&A function on the whole is not as robust or useful as it was in Live Event. Not having all presenters able to view the In Review tab is frustrating - a number of folk in some of our busier meetings want to be able to view and cast opinion on whether or not certain questions should be published but because this is reserved to Co-organizers and the Co-organizers are limited in number to 10, this is causing some issues around deciding/prioritizing who should be able to preview questions ahead of publishing.

 

We have found in testing that deleted questions don't disappear promptly from the Published queue.

 

And there no longer appears to be any Q&A reporting available to organiser, co-organisers or presenters, meaning that the only way to review Q&A is to return to the event in the calendar and deleted questions are gone forever (we used to delete questions as they were answered to try to control the Published queue).

 

It looks like sorting by Most Recent vs Most Liked has disappeared meaning the democratisation of what a community would like to have answered has gone. It was already tricky enough because you couldn't re-order against those parameters so most liked constantly drifted to the bottom. Now the Published queue will be very difficult to manage live and pulling out useful information from the event nigh on impossible.

 

Roles permissions seems to be backwards - how can presenters control who, including co-organizers, is on-screen but not view In Review questions? Meanwhile Co-organizers are unable to invite further presenters to the event? 

 

An issue with production is that now as soon as someone shares a powerpoint it's live to the audience. From the perspective of production, it would be extremely useful if you could bring a presenter's share content on/off screen like you can with presenter cameras.

 

In controlling the production for audience, I like the fact that we can have multiple presenters on screen at once - this is a tremendous improvement on Teams Live. It's a shame, though, that moving presenters on and off screen is so clunky - having to click through them one at a time to bring them on and off is not very slick

 

I'd be very happy to be told what of the above is inaccurate or if there are back-end/tenancy settings that can be changed to fix any of the issues highlighted above.

 

Cheers

Rich

 

5 Replies

Along with Rick's observation, which I agree with, it appears that a change in the last 2 months has affected the ability to add "Dynamic Distribution Groups" to Teams "Town Halls" for meeting distribution. This may be an intended function change. It is important to note that normal (static) Distribution Groups work fine. As a workaround, the sender can open the calendar created using this "wizard" and manually add the Dynamic Groups there. This indicates a possible issue with Teams and/or the Town Hall feature specifically related to dynamic group handling.

In addition, it's good that the recording is now issues in 1920x1080 but then it's worse in that it's also now only 16fps. I can see the bit-rate on the downloaded recording is around the same. Is it not possible in 2024 to accommodate both Full HD and a smooth video playback with increased bit-rate?

We've been having an issue in Town Halls where External Presenters can't see the Q&A panel. Only organizers and attendees can see the Q&A. Is there a setting that we're missing? I assume this isn't intended, because it doesn't make sense that attendees can see something that a presenter can't.

@Steve_SumProductCom I've not encountered this issue in relation to roles but a couple of thoughts - try upgrading a presenter to co-organizer to see if they suddenly get the Q&A tab. And is the error being reported from multiple users across different devices or just a couple of users on similar devices? I've definitely seen, historically, issues with Teams add-ins like Q&A on some iPhones where it was more consistent on android phones. Good luck! 

We were running a test in our org prior to an event. The problem is happening for an external presenter, so we can't upgrade them to co-organizer. In our test, even anonymous attendees could see and participate in Q&A, but the external presenter could not. The external presenter was joining with the desktop app on a Mac, but this doesn't seem to be the problem, because we can join as an organizer from the same Mac, and then Q&A works.

I wonder if it's due to the type of account used by the external presenter. It is a personal Microsoft Account, not an organization account. Even so, it doesn't make sense that an authenticated presenter can't see Q&A, but anonymous attendees can.