Microsoft Teams Webinars: What you need to prepare, control or restrict

Microsoft Teams Webinars: New Capabilities  rolling out now

Microsoft is currently rolling out new Webinar Capabilities for Microsoft Teams, should be finished in May 2021

I have written a Blogpost for Microsoft TechCommunity where you can read more about new features for registration forms, analytics and setup process of webinars:

Microsoft Ignite Live Blog: FS189 – Easy, intuitive webinars with Microsoft Teams

Tony Redmond explained in detailed how Teams Webinars work here at Practical365.

In our weekly Microsoft Teams “Alex and Ragnar Show” I have give a live demo of Webinars: YouTube Video in German

What you need to prepare to enable or restrict Webinars

When you have read Tony’s and my article you should be aware of the new Webinar User Interface, how to set it up and add it to a new or excisting Microsoft Teams Policy with PowerShell Commands like:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity “Allow Meeting Recording” -AllowMeetingRegistration $True -WhoCanRegister Everyone -AllowEngagementReport Enabled -StreamingAttendeeMode Enabled
(find more about this Commandlet here)

A new Teams meeting policy can be created by using the New-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy cmdlet and assign it to users.

I want to focus now on these additonal aspects:

• By default, all users within your tenant will be able to schedule webinars unless current policy configuration prohibits it.
• If  your Teams Policies are set to: allow scheduling private meetings is turned off, then users will not be able to schedule webinars.
• When anonymous join is disabled for the tenant, users can schedule a public webinar but it will fail on join.
• SharePoint lists are required in order to set up webinars. To set this up, learn more here: Control settings for Microsoft Lists.
  Not convinced about Modern Microsoft Lists yet and want to learn more? Here is Part 1 of our Blog Series
• You need to restrict who who can host a webinar that requires registration for everyone, change the WhoCanRegister policy accessed in the Teams admin center.  This can be done  tenant-wide with “WhoCanRegister” or set the policy for specific users.
• Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy is also helpful when you want to turn off registration for entire tenant, external users or for everyone.  You can give select users the ability to create a registration page that supports external attendees. All other users would be able create a registration page for people inside the tenant.