Introducing town hall in Microsoft Teams – a new enterprise event platform replacing Teams Live Event (TLE) which debuted in 2019.
Town hall comes with a dense set of new features and improves on all facets of presenter flow, audience engagement, and post-event reporting. Worktank has produced hundreds of global onsite, virtual and hybrid broadcasts through Microsoft Teams, making our team the go-to for creating best-of broadcast experiences for audience and presenters.
As town hall in Microsoft Teams makes its debut, we’re introducing a new multi-part series to show you how to harness new audience engagement features, tap powerful post-event reporting and new ways to highlight your presenters and their content.
In this introduction, we call out new features and how Town hall in Microsoft Teams bests the outgoing Live Events.
Full Transcription:
Microsoft is retiring Teams Live Events and giving us the new Teams Town Hall. So what is it? What’s the difference? What does it mean for you and your event?
Well, let’s take a look at what separates Town Hall from Teams Live Events.
Up until very recently, a Teams Live Event—or a TLE—was Teams’ native virtual event option. It gave anyone labeled a producer the ability to choose exactly what the attendees were seeing.
Now, at its core, the new Town Hall is the same idea: it gives anyone labeled a producer the ability to choose exactly what the attendees are seeing. Only now, there are some major improvements.
I think most notably is the ability to have multiple presenters on screen simultaneously, which is huge. A big problem with TLE was you could only have one presenter on screen at a time, and this was a huge problem if they were trying to talk to each other. The transitions were laggy, you could only see one person—it was just…
“Our next presenter, Shaun.”
“Hey everyone, thanks so much. My name is Shaun; I’m a producer with Worktank. I’m really happy to be here at this event.
Um, so one of the things that we’re really excited about right now is…”
It wasn’t great.
But now, with Town Hall, you can have up to seven presenters on screen simultaneously. You can also have multiple presenters and a deck being shared for group presentations.
Teams Town Hall has also made some major improvements in attendee interaction with a revamped Q&A widget. Moderators can now post discussion threads, and attendees are able to upvote, react, and reply to other questions and discussions. All of this is flexible and can be made as open or as controlled as the event organizer would like.
Once your event wraps, Town Hall provides some really deep analysis of your attendees and their level of engagement. With TLE, you would get a CSV of all the attendees, but we finally have some native analysis of that data—which is great.
Overall, the control and flexibility Town Hall offers your event is incredible, but it can seem a little unfamiliar. It’s new.
So we’re going to spend the next several videos learning to make the best out of your Town Hall event. We’ll set one up from scratch and learn to manage presenters. We’ll get to know the Q&A widget. We’ll learn about accessibility features and how to uplevel your event to broadcast quality. We’ll look into that post-event report—and so much more.
So, join us while we pop open the hood of the new Teams Town Hall.
