This post is about new webinar features for Microsoft Teams meetings. Microsoft is going to start to rollout webinar capabilities to Microsoft Teams at the end of April 2021 and expecting to complete the rollout in May 2021, as you can read in your Microsoft 365 message center (MC250958). In March 2021 Microsoft announced the feature for Microsoft Teams meetings.

Key webinar capabilities in Microsoft Teams

• Schedule a webinar in the Teams calendar
• Add registrations for webinar or meeting attendees (in your organization and outside/external attendees)

Look and feel

Schedule a webinar using your Microsoft Teams calendar

Add registration to a webinar or meeting

Requirements

• Office 365 or Microsoft 365 E3/E5/A3/A5/Business Standard/Business Premium
• Available for the rest of 2021 for all Team licensed users (trial/promotional period)
• Team user need to be able to host/plan Team meetings [meeting policy]
• Scheduling private meetings must be turned on [meeting policy]
• Anonymous join must be turned on [meeting settings]
• SharePoint lists must be turned on [SharePoint Online]
  quick tip: Set-SPOTenant -DisablePersonalListCreation $false

Settings

By default, the Teams Meeting webinar features will be enabled for everyone.

By default, the Teams Meeting meeting/webinar registration features will be enabled for everyone.

If you want to control webinar feature availability to users more granular based on certain user groups or personas you can configure this in Teams meeting policies. I.e. you could disable it in the global meeting policy and enable it for certain users in a custom meeting policy as needed.

Also, if you want to control registration feature availability to users more granular you can adjust this in Teams policies under “Who can register” and “Allow Meeting Registration”. So, you can modify the registration settings in the Teams meeting policy.

• Turn it off
• Turn off for external attendees [only internal webinar/meeting registrations]
• Selective registration page creation permissions

Above settings can be configure using PowerShell by using the Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet.

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy ... -WhoCanRegister [ Everyone | EveryoneInCompany ]

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy ... -AllowMeetingRegistration [ $true | $false ] 

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Online meetings and live events are key capabilities of Microsoft Teams for modern communication and collaboration, in my opinion. I’d claim that I personally spent most of my time at work in 1:1 chats, video calls and interactive and multi-party video meetings. But that’s not all, of course. For internal/external webinars or events this is the feature which is long awaited by many of you, I’d say. For some use cases Microsoft Team live events are too one-way with only Q&A chat at the moment but working at scale and fine for live streams but not for interactive sessions, though. Now, webinar features including registration options can really help many companies to have something between live events and regular Team meetings. I assume that we will see more and more companies offering webinars using Teams and now have the means to do it in a more administrable way with native Microsoft Team features.

At the time of writing this blog post the features were not yet available in my tenant to demo it.

Additional resources

• Microsoft 365 Message Center ID MC250958
• Microsoft 365 Roadmap Feature ID 80099, 65952, 66459, 66586
• Control Microsoft Lists – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs
• Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy (SkypeForBusiness) | Microsoft Docs