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...