To simplify the virtual event experience on Teams, we are integrating our live event capabilities into our Teams meeting experience. This will create a unified experience for users whether they are hosting a small meeting, customer-facing webinar, or company-wide town hall. As a part of this integration, we are introducing Town halls in Microsoft Teams, a new experience to host and deliver large-scale, internal events to create connections across an organization. Town halls will provide a one-to-many format with advanced production capabilities and a structured approach for attendee engagement. With town halls, customers can host various types of internal as well as external events including company-wide town halls, all hands, global team meetings, internal broadcasts, fireside chats, and more.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 123148
[When this will happen:]
Standard Release (if applicable): We will begin rolling out early October 2023 and expect to complete early October 2023
[How this will affect your organization:]
Town hall will replace Teams Live Events and be available for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 customers and advanced capabilities in town hall will be available for Teams Premium customers. The new town hall experience will be generally available and start to roll out globally to commercial customers on October 5. Starting at launch, town hall will have an ongoing release of features to create parity with Teams Live Events functionality and will reach full feature parity ahead of Teams Live Events retirement in September 2024.
Our recommendation is that customers (both existing and new) start using town hall as it becomes generally available in October. Basic town hall functionality in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5/A3/A5 offerings provide the following capabilities:
- Attendee capacity of 10,000 attendees
- Host up to 15 concurrent events across a tenant
- Co-organizer support
- Automated invitation and event recording emails
- Green room
- Manage what attendees see
- RTMP-in
- RTMP-out
- On-demand recording
- Live translation captions (up to 6 languages)
- Live transcription (AI-generated)
- AI-generated captions
- Third-party eCDN and Microsoft eCDN support
- Attendee reporting
Town hall Template
The template can be found in the Teams client via Calendar > New meeting dropdown > The Town hall feature will reside between the Webinar and Virtual Appointment options.
Template Form
In the template, organizers can write the title and event description, set the date and time, invite co-organizers, internal presenters, and attendees. Inviting attendees is scoped by default to Your Organization which allows attendees who are within your organization and guests to enter the event session. Public setting allows the event to be accessed by any individual with the join link (this is only recommended for public, non-confidential events). Additionally, you can toggle “Only allow Invited people to join” for Your Organization events to enforce access only to attendees explicitly invited in the Town hall template form.
Selecting “Save and Send” informs Presenters and Co-Organizers via email of the event while in draft. The Publish button formally invites all attendees, presenters and co-organizers to the event. Once the event has been saved and published, the organizer can use the following tabs to manage their event:
- The Theming tab allows email customization for the Event Invite
- The Emails tab allows deeper customization to the Event Invite as well as the email for Recording link
- The reports tab presents post session analytics.
Meeting Options
The organizer can further customize their event via the Meeting Options. The Meeting options will have pre-configured settings to enable a large scale, structured event. The organizer can edit default settings for features such as Green room, Q&A, Manage what attendees see, and RTMP-In.
[What you need to do to prepare:]
This feature will be enabled by default upon release, however if required by Admin Policy, can be disabled.
Please update PowerShell module to the latest version before making Large Scale Meeting Event policy changes.
To disable Town hall use the following script:
Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -Identity <policy name> -AllowTownhalls Disabled
To disable Public Town hall utilize the following parameter (this also affects Webinars)
-EventAccessType : EveryoneInCompanyExcludingGuests
Everyone: Enables creating events to allow in-tenant, guests, federated, and anonymous (external to the tenant) users to join the event. (enables/disables a public Large Scale Event)
Note: Learn more about town hall when documentation becomes available on adoption.microsoft.com and learn.microsoft.com on October 5.
