Updates for Town Hall in Microsoft Teams and Teams Live Events

In my opinion, the only thing that they needed to do to Teams Live Events to improve it, was to add more LAYOUT options for the producers to use.  Nice to have Teams Town Hall, but giving us both options would be the best. I understand from speaking with someone in Microsoft, that the Teams Live Event was "built on a different platform" and that's why they're getting rid of it, but why not REBUILD it on the new Teams Platform so that we can choose between them?  Why would they take away options from users who are VERY used to it now?  

Why is the presenter role in townhall not the same as in Live event? Many events are strictly timed and are following a script that a producer is using to make sure everything goes well. In Teams Townhall, that producer role is now co-organizer but any presenter can completely jeopardize the event because (s)he can also close the event...

A presenter should only present, right?

This is great to see. Is there an update on if this will integrate with New Teams instead of sending you to the Web?

Finally happy to see "Additionally, we will not retire Teams Live Events in September 2024, as previously announced." and I also see some of my biggest issues with Town Halls being addressed, (Managing Content, and the managing of presenters), The issues I currently have with Town Halls are:

1 - Unable to manage content ( coming soon  I believe , When ? ) 

2 - Unable to END a Town Hall for Attendees without ending the Town Hall for the Presenters - we always have a debrief discussing Q&A results, attendee numbers, general discussion about the content etc   and then leave. ( Is this on the Roadmap, if so, When )

3 - Often we have 15+ Presenters ( not all cameras on at the same time) but in old Teams I was able to scroll through the list and quickly pick the presenters I want to display, now its tabbed, it takes a long time to find, click through, select and display the presenter,  I know I can use pinning, but I need to do it quickly. so I need a better solution,  ( note that this is also a problem in Teams Live Events using NEW Teams ( OLD Teams is fine ) 

4 - I use NDI to productionize the look and feel of an event / town hall,,  NDI fails if you don't have the presenter on the organizers screen ( can only have 4 at any one time ) if I scroll to check other presenters, NDI Freezes the stream to the production box - There are other scenarios that cause NDI is now untrusted until these anomalies are is fixed.

Regardless of the issues Im having, Town Halls are slowly getting to where I expect them to be, The early release of Town Halls and the BETA nature of it till now has caused a certain amount of stress, really need better roadmap with timing.

I have played with using RTMP to bring content into a Town Hall, but the NDI is so flakey its unusable unless I only have 4 presenters, ( due to the freezing when moving to other presenters)

I know I can run another meeting, productionize it and feed it into a Teams Town Hall,, but then the presenters don't have access to the Q&A and if NDI Fails I don't have a backup using the Town Hall features.

My normal attendee numbers usually vary between 2500 and 7500, so I would rather not have problems 🙂

Regards  Richard

Hi,, OK, so,   its been 12 months since I asked a heap of questions re features that need to be in Town Halls before I can start using town halls ( currently running Live Events still ) 

The questions that still remain unanswered are (unless I have missed any posts ) 

1 - Shared Presentations needs to be managed from the Town Hall management screen ( I know its on its way - when ? )  The presenter just stops sharing and starts sharing again is not a good reliable process - we compile a PPT with all presenters slides with videos etc and we use a tool that allows all presenters to control the slides remotely for a smooth viewer experience. 

2 - Can't bring presenters into the town hall without having first sent an Invite - we constantly need to do this. ( you can in Live Events)

3 - Inviting External Presenters is still Hit and Miss

4 - Ending a Town Hall is too Abrupt, I want to stop the stream for the Attendees and keep the Presenters for a Debrief - the same a Live Events.

I notice that if I end the town hall and someone rejoins within a few minutes, the Town Hall continues.. ???

5 - Need a better way to manage large numbers of presenters, I know Pin is there and you are working on a solution - when will this be available

6 - Would love to be able to resize shared content and presenter, very limited rigid template based views.

There have been many features added over the past 12 months ( like presenter management slider control  etc ) but the main ones that stop me using Town Halls are still absent.

I have to say that Town Halls and Live events both support different work flows and different audiences,  , I cant move to Town Halls because of these issues.

Live Events work so well for us.  Is there a reason why you are retiring Live Events?

Definitely need to keep the producer console with the Preview and Live window - much more professional to cut to a new layout than to clunk around adding and removing people or content in the Live window - very disappointing.  Can you please just add a panel layout and also multiple presenters during "Content Left" in Live Events?  

(Also Content Right would be handy as all our presenters on stage appear to be looking in the wrong direction)

DrewBlundell Thank you for your reply.  It is truly appreciated.  The question I still have is, is Microsoft's goal to eventually eliminate the Teams Live Events though?  Obviously, Microsoft has received a lot of feedback from the community that they're either not happy with the new Teams Town Hall as it is, or that they are not happy to be losing a product that people want to keep.  Otherwise, they would not have made the decision to keep the TLE's active for the foreseeable future.  It would make sense to me, that since TLE is built "on a different platform" that it could be recreated on the NEW platform to keep the users happy who want to keep this kind of Events solution.  Being forced to change the way that everyone works is not favorable.  

Unfortunately, “Town Halls” don’t work the same way for us as live events.
We used the queue very quickly, unfortunately this is no longer available in the "Town Halls".
I also don't want to invite the participants that I authorize to take part in the event right away, but rather send the link by email afterwards. (this is not possible with the “Town Halls”)

The ability to authorize a group of users to the event but not invite them IMMEDIATELY after it is created is essential for our company meetings!

Tom_BOLLENS  Not to mention that the co-organizers don't have ALL the same capabilities as the main organizer.  Meaning, the person who makes the TTH invite MUST be present at the meeting if they need to make changes to the presenters list.  Also, there's no VTC codes so that you can join in the Town Hall from a Video Conference endpoint.  The only way we found to get around this with our organization, is to invite an external email address (meaning non corporate email like gmail or something) and then when that person joins, they can go to "meeting info" and then they have to HIGHLIGHT the meeting info (because for some reason it's not visible unless you highlight it) then copy and paste the info into a word document so that you can see it, and for some reason there will be a VTC code there.  So strange....  This is just poor planning to roll out something that is a half product in my opinion...