Very excited and looking forward to the new Microsoft Teams webinar capabilities. Until now, we had to be satisfied with a regular “online meeting” or “live event” experiences. The online meeting experience didn’t give enough options for hosting a webinar, and the live event experience was overkill for most small businesses looking to host a webinar.
That being said, we dropped Zoom around the end of 2019 and started using Teams exclusively. Before that, we used GoToWebinar, which was nice. Since then, I’ve done a few webinars, and I discovered there were some things that I missed about a more fully-featured webinar tool.
I recall that ClickDimensions had a nice integration with GoToWebinar, but GoToWebinar was a pricey service, and now I’m using Eventbrite for registering attendees, which is free, and also has a ClickDimensions integration.
The updated version of Teams will have an integration with Microsoft Marketing, but more on that later.
This new version of Teams is officially a new service tier; the good news is that it is included at no additional charge if you have one of the following subscription licenses:
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium
- Office 365 E3, E5, A3, or A5
So, you will be able to host full-featured webinars in your Microsoft Teams environment. There are some cool new capabilities where you will be able to overlay video of yourself speaking to your audience on top of your PowerPoint slides. Also, there’s some nuances with the PowerPoint presentation mode, that will enable better eye contact with your audience.
- Easily setup and deliver webinars
- Connect with audiences with integrated registration, multi-presenter support, and interactive participation.
- Delight and engage attendees
- Bring webinars to life with immersive views combining content, speakers, and more with Presenter mode.
- Present like a pro with integrated experiences
- Manage content, attendees, and speaker notes in a single view with PowerPoint Live.
- Use host controls to manage large audiences
- Disable attendee audio, video, and chat, and use lobby controls to manage access.
All good stuff. Even better, you will be able to gain some insights into your attendee audience. You’ll be able to get a view listing who attended and for how long they were in the webinar. The list is exportable to Excel and can be integrated straight over to Microsoft Marketing.
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