Teams Town Hall Replaces Live Events
Teams town halls are a new event type designed to host large audiences. Town halls will replace Live Events, which Microsoft will remove on September 30, 2024. If you’ve ever created a Teams webinar event, running a town hall will seem very similar. That’s because the two event types follow similar methods to set up and manage events. Microsoft still has some features to build into Town Hall to make it functionally equivalent to Live Events. These will come in time. https://office365itpros.com/2023/10/06/teams-town-hall-live-events/Learn from Microsoft: Best practices for engaging employees with AMAs and live events
At the beginning of each fiscal year, Rajesh Jha, EVP of Experiences + Devices at Microsoft, hosts a kick-off event for his organization of more than 40,000 employees. During the event he is eager to get his employees excited about what is to come, listen to, and engage with colleagues through their questions. This year was more engaging than ever as they adopted new technology to achieve their goals: Ask Me Anything (AMA) events and live events in Viva Engage. The event was so successful that the leader has committed to a bi-monthly cadence for future events.
How to embed Town Hall meetings into SharePoint?
Using the approach https://sharepoint.handsontek.net/2023/05/16/embed-microsoft-teams-live-event-sharepoint-page/, I was able to embed and view a Teams Live Event within SharePoint, but I know Live Events are being deprecated and I should move towards Town Hall meetings. When I attempt an embed using a Town Hall meeting, the embed will pickup the meeting name and display it, and it will also display a status (either "Meeting's not started yet", or "Connecting you to the live event"), but never connects or displays the live stream. The fact that it pulls back the meeting name, and can determine if the meeting's started tells me that it understands the Town Hall, but again, no live stream. Is this doable with Town Hall's at this time?
Viva Glint Town Hall - May 2025
On May 6, 2025, we held a Microsoft Viva Glint Customer Town Hall. In case you missed it, or if you’d like to review, below is a summary of the session. At the bottom of the page, you will find the recording and the slides. Product updates Ashwin Raju Jeyakumar, Principal Product Manager, shared recent product updates and upcoming features for Viva Glint and Viva Pulse. New features include zero platform downtime for deployments, the ability to have multiple Glint instances on a single Microsoft tenant, Teams integration for surveys and Nudges, improvements to the survey commenting experience, and Pulse report summarization using Copilot. Ashwin also shared what’s ahead for this year: enhanced self-serve user schema capabilities, custom bulk access, an enhanced PPT export experience, improved admin reporting, action taking that incorporate Pulse follow-ups, Copilot quantitative and qualitative results summarization, and reporting on the impact of Copilot usage on employee sentiment. Customer stories Our first story was from Toshiba. Toshiba has been focusing on how they help managers use Viva Glint - along with Microsoft 365 Copilot - to improve employee engagement, and ultimately productivity, at their organization. We also featured our customer, Andritz. They discussed using Microsoft 365 Copilot and what it means for their organization and their employees, how their HR and IT teams are working together, and how they are evaluating the success of the implementation. Services and partner options Stacie Engler, Principal Manager, Head of Viva Glint Growth, discussed professional services available through Viva Glint third-party partners and Microsoft Unified offering. She emphasized the benefits of these services, including strategic and technical guidance, program design, and insights discovery. Support updates Kia Bernard, Senior Manager, explained the process of requesting support for Viva Glint through the Microsoft Admin Center (MAC). She highlighted which employee roles can submit support requests and provided a step-by-step guide for entering a support request. Research insights Caribay Garcia, Principal Manager, shared recent Research Drops and upcoming projects that her Viva People Science research team is working on. She discussed the importance of understanding effective manager behaviors, HR-IT collaboration, AI readiness, and frontline workers' AI adoption journey. Watch the Recording Here. Questions, comments, or ideas? Post your thoughts below.
Users appearing as Anonymous User (Guest) in Town Hall Q&A
I am not sure if this is expected behavior or not as I cannot find any documentation related to this. When we host a town hall meeting, we are encountering an issue regarding the Q&A feature. When an external participant joins the meeting without signing in, and for example enters "John Doe" for the users name, when submitting a question in the Q&A section, the submission is displayed as from the user "Anonymous User (Guest)" and associated with the email "email address removed for privacy reasons" instead of the name I entered or my actual email address. This behavior is different from when I invite the same external user to a regular teams meeting in which they appear as "John Doe" in the participant list and in chat. I am seeking clarity on why the name and email address were not displayed as entered, and why they defaulted to anonymous settings despite providing identifiable information upon joining. Additionally, I would like to understand how to configure the settings to ensure that external participants' names and provided emails are correctly displayed when they participate in the Q&A. Any guidance or insights on how to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!Teams Town Hall - preventing meeting responses when publishing the event
When publishing Town Hall events, is there some magical switch that needs to be thrown to prevent all of the meeting replies from being sent back to the publisher? Not finding much on this anywhere. I had a person publish an event to 1500 people (via distribution list) to ensure the event was on calendars, and received hundreds of responses. It seems like that would/should default to no responses, but those features are unavailable in the Teams calendar (only in Outlook). Suggestions?
Town Hall and Allow mic or camera for attendees
In the Town Hall Meeting Options, an organizer can turn on the Allow mic or camera for attendees, but in our test using our organization's subscription with MS, the attendees were not able to unmute or turn their cameras on. Is this limited to a certain subscription level?Teams Live-Event with RTMP ingest
Dear all, I have a couple of questions regarding the new Teams Live-Events with RTMP ingest (using an external encoder). So far I´ve been using MS Stream live-events for professional livestreams with an external encoder and it worked great. But since the Stream live-events will be shut down at some point this year, I have to make the switch to the Teams live-events (with RTMP ingest). Is there an option to disable all automatic audio enhancement functions (like noise reduction, etc.)? If I stream music/spoken language to the live-event it doesn´t sound as good as with the Microsoft Stream live-events. Do teams live-events with RTMP ingest offer a buffer in case one of the viewers has an internet problems? Because to me it seems like the RTMP In live-events work rather like a general Teams Video-Call, so that in case of internet problems the audio will still be audible and the image will freeze. Usually streaming platforms have a buffer that will be filled to prevent audio-video dropouts. How do live-events in MS Teams in general differ from the live-events in MS Stream? Thanks in advance for your help! Best regards.
Co-Organizer cannot edit Town Hall Attendees or Presenters
Team, I was added as a co-organizer for a Teams Town Hall. The organizer will be on vacation the day of the TH, so I was added to be able to add presenters if needed. When I open the meeting from my Teams calendar and attempt to Manage Event, it tells me that as a co-organizer I cannot edit anything on the Details page. According to MC688109, this ability was supposed to be added recently. Has this been delayed? How can I get the ability to edit attendees/presenters without cancelling the existing meeting and creating a new one?Assistance on Microsoft Townhalls, Live events and Webinars
Dear All, We hope you're enjoying our new Teams Town Halls! To further support your event experience, we’re excited to introduce the Microsoft Live Event Assistance Program (LEAP)—a complimentary service designed to help you seamlessly plan and execute your events (New Teams Townhalls, Live events, Webinars) What Does LEAP Offer? This free program connects you with Microsoft event experts who can assist with: Training and demos Configuration support Assistance before, during, and after your Town Halls, webinars, or live events Whether you're transitioning from Teams Live Events to Town Halls or planning future events, our team is here to guide you every step of the way. How to Access Free Support To receive assistance for your Microsoft events, simply log a support case with our experts. Please bookmark or update the following links to submit your request: Microsoft events assist portal (LEAP) Microsoft free support for your events (LEAP) Important Notes for First-Time Users Profile Creation: On your first visit, you may be prompted to create a profile. If redirected to a form that doesn’t mention LEAP, simply revisit Live Event Assist after profile creation. When submitting your support request, please follow these guidelines: Product Family: Cloud and Online Services Product: Live Events Assistance Program (LEAP) Support Type: Professional No Charge Issue Description: Title: Live Events Assistance Request Event Date and Duration Event Location Note: Use your work contact details (corporate email). Personal accounts such as Outlook or Gmail are not supported. If you're an event attendee, please contact your event host for assistance. Additionally, our team can assist with Microsoft eCDN-related queries. Learn More To explore the full benefits of the LEAP program, visit: Microsoft Virtual Event Guidance We look forward to helping you make your events a success!
