Teams meeting registration and webinars

Rumours have been spreading about new Teams features, including webinars, so we thought it was time for another article with the latest news. 

Teams meeting registration - available now 

Teams meetings now come with an additional option allowing the meeting organiser to require guests to register. Available now, this is part of the extra functionality being made available to work with the new Teams Webinar features, when they become available.  

In Teams, when you set up a new scheduled meeting you will now see an additional drop-down menu 'Require registration' where you can customise your meeting to suit your needs.   

When you send the invitation, recipients will receive an invite including a 'Join event' registration link - you can also share the link directly by email or other means. After participants register, they’ll get a friendly ‘thumbs up’ and a confirmation email will be sent to the email address they signed up with, containing additional details and of course the 'Join meeting' button.   

Webinars and Live events in Teams 

With our move to new Microsoft licences (being rolled out very soon), all Teams users at Oxford will see additional options for meetings popping up in Teams. Instead of just 'Meet now 'and 'Schedule a meeting', you’ll also see options for 'Webinar' and 'Live Event'.  

Webinars come with default options to help shape an event but these can be changed in the meeting settings just like normal Teams meetings.  This short video is packed with more information about using the webinars feature.  Microsoft’s guidance for Webinars also shows off upcoming features such as the PowerPoint Live/Presenter Mode (no firm dates for the rollout of these yet).

Live events differ slightly to the normal Meetings/Webinars, as they are designed to be attended by numbers larger than a standard meeting capacity. Under the new licence arrangements, any meeting with more than 350 attendees will automatically ‘scale’ to become a Live event. You can find out more about this feature on our Teams Live events Help page. 

Coming soon  

Have you seen the Teams roadmap yet? Did you know you can vote for features to be developed? Our article, Influencing the development of Teams, has useful information about how you can make a difference. In the meantime, we heard the below features are expected very soon, so keep your eyes peeled: 

• You’ll be able to set your meeting so that participants join using a digital meeting ID/code adding an extra layer of security to your meetings. 
• Organisers will be able to lock meetings to prevent unwanted join attempts.  
• Revised in-meeting share experience with a new design  
• You will be able to set your out of office within Teams and it will sync with your Outlook calendar, presence, and contact card information 
• 'Tasks by Planner and To Do' app name to be shortened to 'Tasks' for simplicity, brevity and to better reflect the purpose of the app.    

Teams training, help and advice  

If you want to learn more about using the Teams software package to best effect, don’t forget you can join one of our courses to find out how to get the most out of this versatile tool. Here's a quick guide with valuable resources to help you use Nexus365 and its suite of apps, including Teams, effectively. And there's plenty more, just search for ‘Teams’ in the course listing on our IT Learning Centre what's on page.  

If you have a question about good practice for teaching with Teams, please contact the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) or check the CTL website which has lots of useful information.  

To see the latest Teams Q&A and the latest announcements, any member of Oxford University can join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG). You'll also find tips, tricks, quick start guides and more. The joining code is LNJVOFR.     

Top tip  

Got a message you want to share in a Teams channel? You can do this directly from new versions of Outlook/OWA using the ’Share to Teams’ button (available as an add-in to your Outlook client). Here are two easy ways to share an email from Outlook to Teams.