Communications Blog • 7 MIN READ

Top Teams Tips: Meetings and Webinars

Microsoft Teams allows for multifaceted team interaction. As well as seamless collaboration on documents in the Microsoft Office suite, users can engage in interactive meetings and webinars for up to 1,000 attendees, with end-to-end webinar support including custom registration pages and a range of presentation options.

As Microsoft Teams evolves, and new features are added regularly, we want to keep you up to date with the latest enhancements, and how you can optimize your Teams experience. This installment of our ‘Top Teams Tips’ series, covers some of the features of meetings and webinars.

Attendance Dashboard

Microsoft Teams now has a new ‘Attendance Tab’ to access details of Teams meetings. The feature allows you to view a post-event attendance report to help you understand registration, attendance, and participation. The feature covers regular Teams meetings as well as webinars, where organizers can see how many registered attendees turned up, or if any unregistered people attended. It also shows which attendees were engaged for all or part of the meeting.

Attendance Dashboard

Source: Microsoft

The feature also allows for people to join and leave meetings multiple times. When an organizer leaves a meeting, it closes, but if the organizer restarts that meeting, attendees can re-join it, and each time this happens, Teams generates a new version of the attendance report. Each new version can be viewed via a drop-down menu.

Attendance Timestamp

Source: Microsoft

Lowering all raised hands

One of the popular features of Teams is the ability to raise your hand virtually during a meeting. This lets people know you want to contribute without interrupting the conversation.

When you select ‘Show Participants, you’ll see a list of all those who have raised their hands, listed in the order in which they raised them. Presenters or organizers have the option to lower everyone’s hands at once.

Lower Hands

Source: Microsoft

This feature helps make way for newly raised questions once an issue or item has been resolved.

Spotlighting multiple users in a meeting

Another great meetings feature is ‘Spotlighting’ - the ability to focus on a certain person, whether it’s a guest presenter, yourself, or another team member. Just recently, Teams enhanced this feature, so organizers and presenters can now spotlight up to 7 participants simultaneously during meetings.

Previously, while an attendee could pin multiple participants for their private view, only one participant could be emphasized for all attendees. To spotlight multiple participants, click on the context menu of your additional participant(s) and select Add Spotlight. For meetings with multiple speakers or presenters, this is great to focus all attendees’ views on those specific video feeds.

Spotlight

Source: Microsoft

Inking and laser point in PowerPoint Live

Virtual laser pointer and ink annotations are now available in PowerPoint Live. Presenters can engage more with their audience by drawing attention or clarifying certain sections of the PowerPoint deck.

Just as you would use a physical laser point in a room, PowerPoint Live allows you to effectively point at different places in the presentation so the audience can easily follow along with what’s on the slide. Only the active “in control” presenter can see and make annotations via the annotation toolbar.

Combined with Chat Bubbles this can utilize smaller (or single) screen devices when you can present the content, ink to it and also stay up to date with chat easily, without sharing your screen.

Updated Large Gallery View on Teams mobile

Microsoft has recently improved the ‘Large Gallery’ layout for meetings on Teams mobile. This is a mobile-optimized layout for Teams mobile users that allow you to swipe through all the participants in a meeting. With up to 10 participants per page on your screen, you can now see all participants clearly on your mobile device. This is available in iOS 13+ and Android OS 9+ or any version with more than 4GB RAM. All other devices continue to see the current large gallery experience.

Mobile View

Source: Microsoft

Include device audio when sharing on iOS and Android

You can now include audio when sharing on iOS and Android devices during a Teams meeting. Tis is particularly useful when sharing a video with voiceover and music. It allows all attendees to watch simultaneously without echo or sync issues. This setting can be found under More Actions: Share screen with audio.

Device Audio

Source: Microsoft

1:1 PSTN Call Recording

This feature gives user the ability to record a Microsoft Teams call made to another user who is using Teams. Recently, Microsoft changed how 1:1 Call recording is enabled. Before April 2021, the setting was controlled by the "Teams meeting policy". After May 31, 2021, this setting in "Meeting Policy" only works for recording a meeting, it does not work for call recording.

To enable call recording settings, you need to modify the ‘Teams Calling Policy’ using PowerShell. This setting is disabled by default. You can either enable it for your global policy or you can create a custom policy, which has this feature enabled, and apply that policy to users who require this feature.

Better Together mode for Teams phones and Teams displays

Better Together mode allows users to pair their PC with their Teams phone or display, meaning audio and video can be streamed on their Teams device, and content can be viewed on their PC. With this feature, the devices can be coordinated so that when one device is unlocked, the other automatically unlocks as well.

This feature allows the PC screen to be used for other purposes such as co-authoring, taking notes, or engaging in other forms of collaboration while simultaneously engaging in a meeting or call.

With new and innovative ways to streamline your meetings and webinars, Microsoft continues to develop Teams to help organizations save time, increase productivity, and create a better work/life balance.

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Topics: Communications Customer experience UCaaS management Microsoft Teams Collaborate

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