Teams Live Events now support anonymous external presenters, defined as people who don’t have Azure AD or MSA accounts. It’s a useful change because many large public meetings (the natural ground for Live Events) involve external presenters brought in because of their expertise in the meeting topic. The update is rolling out in April 2021.
Now deployed to Office 365 tenants, large Teams meetings can support up to 20,000 view-only attendees, if an organization chooses to update its Teams meeting policies. Interestingly, this is a feature which Microsoft originally planned to license under its Teams advanced communication add-on, but the growth of large meetings in organizations might have forced their hand to bring the feature to mainline Teams.
Microsoft has extended the temporary increase in the limit for Live Events participants from 10,000 to 20,000 until June 30, 2021. The extended limit reflects the popularity of online events during the Covid-19 pandemic. After this point, you’ll need a Teams advanced communications license to organize a live event for more than 10,000 participants.
Teams Live Events are a form of Teams meeting that’s more structured than the regular gathering. You won’t use a live event for every meeting, but they’re very valuable for scenarios like company town halls, product announcements, and so on. It’s easy to create a live event and a little practice goes a long way to broadcasting solid performances.