From team meeting to live event in Office 365

In recent months, the Corona crisis has forced many institutions to review their processes. Home office has become the norm for many, and many a classic meeting or event has been held online with appropriate software. The Microsoft 365 tools are therefore on everyone's lips, as they are quickly available and in their extended use almost cost-neutral. However, some companies are still unsure of the benefits they can derive from the O365 applications. Webinars or even large events can be planned very easily with an automated registration process. With the help of Microsoft Teams, Power Automate and Forms, all the prerequisites are in place for a live team event to which up to 10,000 internal or external participants can register.

The following three components from the Office 365 Toolkit are sufficient to perform a live team event with an automated logon process.

MS Teams

Teams Live Event is the basic requirement for organizing and holding major events. Two groups of people are important:

• Firstly, there are participants who can see the transmitted image and hear the sound. In order to influence the event and ask questions, there is also the possibility to do this in the question & answer area (at first glance this probably doesn't read very charming, but imagine an event with 300, 1,500 or even 10,000 participants. They would be constantly interrupted acoustically or the audience would be distracted because during the short transition between two speakers, images of people who think they are unobserved could be seen)

• On the other hand there are the speakers. They can follow the presentations of the other speakers like participants, but this circle of people may also speak and share their screen. The speakers can also answer the technical questions in the F&A section. More information on this topic in the article "Microsoft Teams - Meeting and Home Office Solution not only in times of crisis".

To hold a classic webinar, a live event must first be created. To do this, in MS Teams, go to the calendar icon in the left-hand image menu and then to the top right arrow pointing downwards, right next to the "+ New meeting" button. In the drop-down menu that opens, click on "Live Event" and fill in the required information. Important is here,

• to register the speakers,
• to activate the F&A section and,

after clicking on "Plan" to copy the participation link. You can get this in the overview of the event in the upper third by clicking on "Get participant link".

MS Forms

The next step is the sending of the invitations. If you don't want to send the registration link manually to every participant, two additional tools from the Office 365 package come into play. With little effort, they allow you to set up an automatic registration process.

Microsoft Forms is a tool for conducting surveys but also for requesting information. For the automated registration for a webinar, Forms can be used to request the data that is important for participation in the webinar. These forms are created within a few minutes. In addition, information can be provided to the registrants, e.g. a link to the privacy policy and the agenda of the webinar.

MS Power Automate

With Microsoft Power Automate, recurring processes that are triggered by an event can be automated. In our case, this so-called trigger is the entry of a person in the form prepared in Forms.

The figures below show an event-driven process chain that was created in Power Automate for our example. The trigger is that a response was submitted with the Forms form. In the next step, the response is split up and the automate checks if responses have been entered or if the fields are empty. If the fields are empty, the process stops. If there is any information, this is used to complete and send a pre-formulated e-mail template with the participation link.

With the confirmation sent to all participants, the event can now start. The event is started by the producer at the given time, just like any classic team meeting.

Fazit

Even in times of corona and home office, there is no need for highly complex systems and processes to turn your ideas into reality and to hold customer events with a webinar. Most of the technical requirements are often already met and only little preparation and routine is required to communicate successfully with your customers and prospects. The interaction of different programs from Office 365 makes it possible.

noventum's experienced consultants are prepared for all questions concerning Office 365 and help to implement solutions from this technical environment, now and after CoVid 19.

The public webinars that noventum has held with Microsoft teams are available as recordings on the noventum YouTube Channel.