Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Goodbye Live Events, Hello Town Halls

This blog is part of a series on Teams. For more articles, check back often

Written: 08/10/2023 | Updated: N/A

Gran Canaria was awesome. It had the weather. It had the rugged scenary. Good hotel. Good food. And we got plenty of time with our son in the pool. So we very much got everything that we could ask for. But as is the way of things this year it flew by way too fast; and so here we are one week back and ready to get the blog underway. So in that time what’s happened with Teams? A lot. Teams 2.1 went GA. Microsoft is gearing up for Ignite and Immersive spaces for Mesh is now in public preview. I’ll cover all of these things soon. But I wanted to focus first on the announcement that Live Events is now in sunset and will be retired in September 2024. What is replacing it? Town Halls. Defined by Microsoft as ‘a new experience to host and deliver large-scale, internal events to create connections across an organization’, this will be a unified experience with the standard Teams Meeting. Out of the box functionality will include 10,000 attendee capacity, the ability – like standard Teams Meetings – to run for 30 hours; and there can be 15 concurrent instances at once. We can see that it already has much of the functionality we have come to expect from Live Events: Q&A, on demand recording, co-organiser support, support for hard mute, live translation, live transcription – so it can effectively run like a Live Event today and has that same one-to-many focus. Saying this, parity isn’t there yet as at the time of writing it’s missing features such as as RTMP Out and external presenter. Indeed, some functionality now requires having Teams Premium: for example the ability to scale up to 20,000 attendees, the ability to run 50 concurrent instances and eCDN. Thinking about these things all up was Town Halls and the transition from Live Events a recent development? No because it was either Ignite 2020 or 2021 where it was said live that they were going to converge the experiences. And since Live Events was a completely different platform under the hood it made sense to get shot of it, if anything because it was probably reaching limitations. But the real question is – will they be used more than Live Events? I am going to play my get out of jail free card and leave that question to you since I just got back from annual leave…

Let’s go.

This blog will cover

• Ensuring that Town Halls are enabled
• Configuring a Town Hall
• Disabling Live Events

Note this blog will have abridged steps which will assume some experience with Microsoft Teams, The Microsoft Teams Admin Centre and PowerShell. All blogs will use the new Teams Desktop Client 2.1+ where possible. This is configured in a Ring 4 test tenant and the desktop client is used with Windows 11 Enterprise 23H2.

Prerequisites

• Microsoft Teams licence (within Microsoft 365 licence). Basic capabilities are available in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 E1/E3/E5/A3/A5 plans. Advanced capabilities are available in Teams Premium
• Global Administrator or Teams Administrator Role

ENSURING THAT TOWN HALLS ARE ENABLED
Let’s first ensure that Town Halls are enabled and we can set one up

1.) As the administrator log into https://login.microsoftonline.com and select Admin from the left navigation or from the waffle

2.) In the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre select Show All from the left navigation and then select Teams

3.) In the Teams Admin Centre, select Meetings then Events Policies

4.) Select the policy. This example will use the Global (Org Wide Default)

5.) Ensure that Allow Townhalls is On and select Save. Like Webinars, note that the setting Who can view and register for the event determines if the Town Hall is public or not.

6.) If you want to ensure that only a section of users can schedule Town Halls, then disable Town Halls in the Global Org Wide Policy and create/assign a Custom Policy to the specific individuals

7.) All of this can be configured in PowerShell. For example, get the policy using

Get-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity "Global"

Then use commands such as

Set-CsTeamsEventPolicy -Identity "Global" -AllowTownhalls Disabled
Set-CsTeamsEventPolicy -Identity "Global" -AllowTownhalls Enabled
Set-CsTeamsEventPolicy -Identity "Global" -EventAccessType Everyone

To manage the policy or create a new policy through the New-CsTeamsEventPolicy cmdlet

CONFIGURING A TOWN HALL
Now we have ensured that Town Hall’s are ready to go, it’s time to configure one.

1.) In the Teams client, from the left app rail, select Calendar App

2.) From the New Meeting button select Dropdown and then Town Hall. Note this option will only display if you have the right licencing and the functionality is enabled in the policy assigned to you

3.) Add the following details and then select Save and Send Invites

• Name of Town Hall
• Time/Duration of Town Hall
• Description of Town Hall
• Co-organisers
• Presenters
• Whether the Town Hall is Internal or Public
• Invited users by Name or by Group (From testing Microsoft 365 groups are supported, further testing is needed for Security Groups)

4.) Select Theming to set the banner, logo and theme colour of the Town Hall landing page

5.) Select Emails to preview email communications

6.) Reports and Recordings are not ready until after the Town Hall

7.) Once, done return to Details and select Meeting Options. Here the meeting options are exactly the the same as a standard Teams Meeting, or Webinar. Once done select Save

8.) When everything has been completed select Publish.

9.) The Town Hall can be joined in many ways including the Event, through Teams Calendar or Outlook

10.) The join experience is familiar, and the Town Hall experience should be also be familiar for those up to speed on Teams Meeting functionality. The Yellow button to Start the Meeting is the Green Room functionality which was introduced not too long back into Teams. Until the meeting is started attendees will not be allowed in, and neither will the recording start.

11.) At the time of writing PowerPoint Live, Excel Live, Presenter Mode and Whiteboard are not supported. It is recommended that content is shared before the meeting is started.

12.) Select Start Meeting to come out of the Green Room and the Town Hall will start along with the recording where the top left yellow button also turns red for live. The number watching the live event can be seen here.

13.) Presenters are brought on screen via More Options (…) on their gallery item

14.) What is interesting to note at the current time is there is no way to ‘stop’ the Town Hall being live other than to end the meeting. The recording can be stopped (and restarted) prior to the end of the meeting.

15.) Post Town Hall, the recording is kept in the Files tab and the attendance details and downloadable report in the Attendance tab

That’s pretty much it. The experience is similar to Teams meetings and Webinars, simply leveraging the new features of Teams which have been introduced over the last few years. This should give you enough to move forward and gets hands on to test one out.

DISABLING LIVE EVENTS
Now that Town Halls have arrived, it could be time to start disabling Live Events. Your organisation may want to run with both for a period, or it could decide that it wants to keep things simple for users. Of course, this decision could be based on specific functionality which may not be here yet such as RTMP Out where it will be neccessary to continue to use Live Events whilst waiting for Town Halls to support it, and come to parity.

1.) In the Teams Admin Centre select Meetings then Live Events Policies

2.) Select the Policy (here defined as Global (Org Wide Default))

3.) Turn off Live Event Scheduling and select Save

4.) After propagation it is no longer possible to schedule Live Events. As noted in an earlier section, if you want to disable across the org, but still leave the functionality on for some for a period, disable the global org wide and add a custom Live Events policy.

Hope you enjoy the new experience. In my opinion, a lot cleaner, no more producer role which now goes to the Organiser/Co-organiser/Presenter) and should be familiar to those who use Teams Meetings regularly.