Setting up Teams Webinars

When Microsoft announced they were introducing webinar functionality into Teams we couldn't wait to try it. This week it appeared in our Microsoft 365 tenant so we thought we would schedule a webinar to check it out.

Enabling people outside your organisation to join webinars

Before you set up your first webinar it is likely that you will need to modify the settings in your Microsoft 365 tenant. By default, webinars are only available to people inside your organisation. There is currently no way to enable access to external users in the Teams admin centre, so you will need to use PowerShell to make some tweaks to the settings.

The settings require the Teams PowerShell module. To install it fire up a PowerShell session using the Run as administrator option and enter the command below:

Install-Module MicrosoftTeams

We followed the Microsoft guidance on how to allow external users to register and ran into a problem. The Microsoft documentation suggests the following commands to allow anyone, including anonymous users, to register for webinars:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling True

Then, run:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -WhoCanRegister Everyone

When we ran it, we encountered the following error:

PS C:\> Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling True
Cannot convert 'System.String' to the type 'System.Boolean' required by parameter 'AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling'.

It appears that (at the time of writing) there is a small error with one of the commands in the Microsoft documentation. We should be using $True rather than True in the command to AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling. The correct command is:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -AllowPrivateMeetingScheduling $True

Then, run:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -WhoCanRegister Everyone

Please also check your meeting settings in the Teams admin centre to make sure that you have enabled the anonymous join setting. If it is disabled, anonymous users will not be able to join webinars regardless of the settings applied above.

There is another important setting you are likely to want to change. To run a report to see who registered and attended your webinar you need to enable the AllowEngagementReport policy:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -AllowEngagementReport Enabled

Scheduling your webinar

The process of setting up a webinar is simple. From your Teams calendar click on the dropdown next to the new meeting button and select the Webinar option. You will be presented with a new screen with the option to add a title, select presenters, set the schedule, and provide some additional details.

At the top of the screen, you will also see an option to View the registration form. Click the link to personalise the form and add custom fields, speaker bios and a banner. For our upcoming webinar, we added a couple of fields to the registration form to capture some additional information.

Adding additional fields is simple, click + Add field and select from a list of predefined options or alternatively you can add custom questions.

You also have the option to make the fields required.

When you have finished editing the registration form you can grab the link and start sharing!

If you would like to join us on our webinar, please register using the following link.