Can We Use Teams for Webinars?
Microsoft continues its innovation of Teams, their collaboration and communication platform. The newest features provide new capabilities as well as improved experiences for people on both sides of a meeting. Many of the following are generally available or will be soon:
Webinars
Teams now provides the ability to host interactive webinars for up to 1,000 attendees. Similar to setting up a meeting in Teams, organizers can create custom registration pages and control whether attendees have chat and video. Teams provides rich presentation options to add to the quality of the webinar. If 1,000 attendees isn’t enough for your business, Teams also supports hosting live event broadcasts for up to 10,000 and will be increasing that number to 20,000 by year end.
PowerPoint Live
Before now, when I have trained presenters to use Teams, I have recommended against using the built-in PowerPoint within Teams, but to instead use the standalone PowerPoint application and share that Window. This recommendation was due to the limited capabilities of Team’s built-in PowerPoint that many presenters find limiting. PowerPoint Live changes that. Now, the presenter can see everything they need to in a single view – upcoming slides, notes, meeting chat as well as audience members if desired. Additionally, the attendees are able to personalize their experience by using high-contrast mode or screen readers. Attendees can also move through the webinar content at their own pace, and in future releases, will be able to get slides translated in their native language. A word of advice: presenters using more advanced features like transitions and embedded video will want to test their presentations in PowerPoint Live before actually going live.
Presenter Mode
PowerPoint, when used properly, enhances a presentation and provides a rich experience for attendees. Presenter Mode provides presenters with even more options to this end. Presenters can now choose from three modes to determine how attendees will view the presenter and their content. The first, Standout mode, will be available later this month with Reporter mode and Side-by-Side mode soon following. Standout mode puts the presenter’s silhouette in front of the content. Reporter mode shows the presenter with the content over their shoulder and Side-by-Side boxes the content and presenter next to each other. The image from Microsoft below demonstrates each mode.
Getting Started With Teams
We have focused here on Team’s features for presenting information to an audience large or small. But Teams provides so much more. Teams is an outstanding communication and collaboration platform for all areas of your business. It is more efficient, effective and secure than email for communication and productivity. To find out more about Microsoft Teams or put it to work in your business, book a call with Skyline IT Management today.
