Microsoft Teams update wants to say goodbye to webinars forever

(Image credit: Microsoft)

As it continues to go from strength to strength, Microsoft Teams now appears to be taking on the webinar industry in its latest update.

The video conferencing platfrom will soon be able to support interactive webinars for people inside and outside of an organization with up to 1,000 attendees.

The feature was announced at Microsoft Ignite in March 2021, but the company now says it will be rolling out to users within the next few weeks.

Large-scale

The new Microsoft Teams feature will help users support fully interactive webinars from start to finish, offering tools such as custom registration, rich presentation options, host controls such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video, and post-event reporting.

If your webinar ends up topping 1,000 users, Microsoft Teams can switch to instead offering a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience.

This follows on from the release of Microsoft Teams Connect at Ignite 2021, which allows users to invite external parties (e.g. customers and partners) into a single shared channel as opposed to adding them as a network guest.

The service will allow external contacts to take advantage of all Teams collaboration capabilities - including chat, meetings, document co-authoring etc. - while giving the host organization tighter control over how users access data.

The launch also comes shortly after Microsoft revealed that joining a Teams call will become even easier - via a tool heavily influenced by one of its biggest rivals, Zoom.

Soon, Microsoft Teams users will be able to share a meeting code to enter to start or join a call. According to Microsoft, all meetings will have a Meeting ID that is automatically assigned to a Microsoft Teams user, and added to the meeting invite under the meeting link.

This will then take users directly into the meeting, hopefully offering a more secure (and more accurate) way to ensure users are in the right place, as well as making invites easier to share across social media and messaging apps.

And we've ranked the best headsets for conference calls

Via MSPowerUser

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Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.