Scheduling a Live Event in Microsoft Teams

When to use:

When you need to present to a large-capacity audience (Zoom’s limit is 300)

When you need webinar-like control over the meeting (more of a presentation than a meeting)

Schedule a Live Event:

Note: Unlike a normal Teams Meeting, Teams Live Events can host a room with up to 10,000 participants (20,000 until October 1 due to Covid-19). Participants will only have the ability to type in a Q&A chat.

Also note: Normally you can only run 15 concurrent live events across all of UMass Amherst. That limit has been increased to 50 simultaneous events until October 1st. Usually there aren’t more than a couple going across campus anyways.

In Teams, open your Calendar from the sidebar.                                                                            

Click on the arrow next to New meeting and select Live event. 

Fill in all the essential fields (title, timeframe, description). You can Invite presenters to present with you and change their role to be either Producer (Able to share and control what content participants see) or Presenter (Only able to share content).

Click Next once you have everything filled. 

Change Live event permissions according to type of event (Note: Org-wide is recommended when everyone joining has a UMass NetID). All other settings can be left untouched.

Click Schedule.