Microsoft is upgrading its Teams Town Hall events service with new audience live interactions and reactions, reaffirming its position as the vendor’s premier virtual events solution.
Teams Town Hall, launched last September, is Microsoft’s “new digital streaming event solution for large events,” as Drew Blundell, Microsoft’s Product Marketing Manager, described in a blog post accompanying the update.
Complementing existing compelling features such as the ability to bring multiple presenters on stage, send out attendee emails, and observe real-time health analytics for the event are new capabilities to “build on the highly engaging and interactive experiences that town hall delivers”.
Town hall adoption continues to grow as we continue to prioritize driving new value for our users. In the last quarter, we saw significant increases in new customers trying town hall, total usage, and the number of hosted events. Our mission is to continue to add new additional capabilities to town hall that make your streaming digital events more impactful to audiences and more seamless to execute.”
What Exactly Are The New Features?
Attendees will soon be able to express their feedback and engagement through live reactions and streaming chat, and presenters can interact with their audience via the raise hands feature. Advanced production experiences, including the producer role, content queuing, and preview scene support, are also coming to Town Hall, enhancing event execution capabilities.
Microsoft is introducing several new features to ensure a seamless user and admin experience. These include engagement capabilities like Q&A functions (voting, filters, sorting, and archiving questions) and the ability to export questions to CSV and download Q&A reports.
Additionally, device capabilities are being expanded to support presenters and attendees on MTR-W, CVI, and VDI. Advanced production experiences, such as the producer role, queuing shared content, and preview scenes, are also being added to enhance event execution.
Teams Live Events Will Continue (For Now)
The tech giant also announced it was delaying the retiring of Teams Live Events in September 2024, which was the previous shuttering date.
Microsoft explains that Town Hall will remain the chosen platform for new features and innovations, encouraging Teams Live Events users to upgrade to Town Hall when ready. However, the deadline has been extended to provide users with more flexibility.
“We’ve spoken with customers and understand how important it is to ensure a smooth transition to town hall,” Blundell said. “We are committed to making it as easy and beneficial as possible for customers to experiment, adopt, and implement town hall as their destination for large-scale digital events, as well as allow customers to upgrade from Live Events to town hall on their own schedule.”
In the coming days, Microsoft customers using Teams Live Events who wish to continue past September 30, 2024, will be able to schedule Teams Live Events instances beyond this date.
What Other Teams News Has Happened Recently?
Microsoft Build 2024 last week featured several significant pieces of Teams news.
Perhaps the most attention-grabbing was Microsoft’s unveiling of Team Copilot, an expansion of its landmark AI assistant into a “valuable member of your team”.
Team Copilot aims to evolve the AI-powered assistant from a behind-the-scenes helper into a meeting facilitator, group collaborator, and project manager, allowing users to fully control task and responsibility assignments. It will be available in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Loop, and more, intending to further enhance user productivity and collaboration beyond what Copilot currently offers.
There were other notable Teams announcements at Build.
New Teams meetings capabilities include intelligent recap for transcription-only meetings, scheduled channel meetings, management of transcription and recording permissions, and the option to disable screen sharing to prevent information leakage.
For Teams Phone, new features include calling forwarding settings on Teams phone devices, busy-on-busy settings, redirecting incoming calls to voicemail, making calls on behalf of call queue or auto attendant numbers, and prompting users to set PIN locks via the admin centre.
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