Microsoft Brings Webinar Capabilities to Teams

Microsoft announced today that Webinars and PowerPoint Live are now generally available in Microsoft Teams. And Presenter mode will begin rolling out later this month.

“Over the last year, we have found new ways to create engaging virtual experiences at work,” Microsoft’s Nicole Herskowitz writes. “We’ve transformed spaces in our homes to offices, developed new skillsets for remote collaboration, and in some cases, adopted new technology to get work done. I often hear from our customers about the burden of using different tools to accomplish similar tasks at work. This is one of the reasons I’m excited to announce new innovations in Microsoft Teams that give you more ways to use the tool you rely on every day for internal collaboration and meetings, now for webinars and external events.”

Here’s what’s new.

Webinars. This feature lets you host interactive webinars with up to 1000 attendees with custom registration pages and attendee emails, rich presentation options, and host controls. And for those who need to reach more than 1,000 attendees, Teams supports a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience that supports 20,000 users through the end of this year because of the pandemic.

PowerPoint Live. Now, those hosting presentations in Teams can view upcoming slides, notes, meeting chat, and the audience in a single view while presenting. And attendees can privately navigate the content at their own pace and use high contrast mode and screen readers to make content more accessible. In a coming update, slide translation capabilities will allow attendees to select their native language and automatically have slides translated for them on the fly.

Presenter mode. This coming new feature will let presenters customize how their video feed and content appear to the audience. There are three usage modes: Standout mode, which shows the speaker’s video feed as a silhouette in front of the shared content, Reporter mode, which shows content as a visual aid above the speaker’s shoulder, as on a news broadcast, and Side-by-side mode, which shows the presenter’s video feed alongside their content as they present. Standout mode is coming first, and Reporter and Side-by-side will roll out soon.