Teams Live Events FAQs

To schedule a Microsoft Teams Live Event fill out our "Request to Host a Live Event" form:

Request to host a Live Event

You will be asked to provide the following:

• Do you want a practice event? - we highly recommend that you have a practice event. If you select "Yes" to this option, you will be asked for your practice event details first. 
• Title and description of your event
• Target date & time of your event
• Email addresses of your producer(s) and presenter(s)
• Do you have guest / external presenters? - If you intend to have an external presenter in your Live Event you must add them to a Team as a guest before requesting your Live Event. For information on how to add external users as guests, see "Can I invite guests (without a University of Edinburgh account) to my Team" under the Guest User FAQs heading on our Teams FAQs page.
• Do you want to record your event? - If you do, you must inform your producers and presenters of this. Please read our "Guiding Principles - recording of online and Digital Events" drop-down before deciding if you want to record your event. 
• Do you want an attendee engagement report? - this will generate a report, after your event ends, of users who attended your Live Event
• Do you want Q&A? - this allows your audience members to type questions into a Q&A box during your event. This can be moderated by a producer. 
• Will your event be public? - you should decide if your Live Event will only be for University of Edinburgh users or if anyone, with the join link, will be able to join your event. See our "Planning your Teams Live Event" section below for considerations you should take when making your Live Event public. 

If eligibile your Teams Live event will be scheduled for you centrally by Information Services Group Facilities.

Yes, please fill out our Update / Cancel a Live Event form:

Update/Canel your Live Event

To update or cancel your Live event you will be required to provide your current Live Event title and date. 

You can requests updates to any of the following:

• Date of your live Event
• Start time of your Live Event
• End time of your Live Event
• Disable recording, Q&A, captions and attendee engagement report
• Add new producer(s) and/or presenter(s)
• Add anything else you need updated in the "Additional details" box, and the central booking team will assist you. 

Yes, to have your Live Event be made available to the public, simply select "Yes" to the "Will your event be public" question in the Request to host a Live Event form:

Request to host a Live Event

When deciding to host a public Live Event, there are a few things you should take into consideration:

Users can join anonymously - users do not have to register for a Teams Live Event and so could join your event anonymously. 

Do not post join links on public social media - posting your Live Event join link on public social media has a risk of causing unwelcome disruption to your event by allowing anyone to join. 

Consider the University's Information Security and data protection policies - you can readthe University's information security policies from the Information Security webpages. You can also review the Universities policy on Data protection on the University of Edinburgh Data Protection Policy webpages.

No, breakout rooms are not currently available in Teams Live Events. 

You can use Breakout Rooms in normal Teams meetings (which have capacity for up to 300 attendees). For further information on this please see our Breakout Rooms in Teams page. 

You can also use Breakout Rooms in Teams Webinars. These have capacity for up to 1000 interactive attendees and 10,000 view-only attendees. These are also closer to Live Events as attendees have their cameras and mics off by default. For further information on this please see our Teams Webinar page. 

Alternatively, Breakout Rooms are also available through Zoom. Zoom offers guidance on how to manage break rooms.

You may wish to look into an alternative event platform. You can find out more about these on our Online and Digital Events pages. 

Yes, currently Microsoft Teams Live Events can only run for 4 hours, and this is an absolute limit.

To run a Live Event longer than 4 hours you will have to schedule separate Live Events and pass your attendees different links for each event. 

Alternatively you may wish to look into an alternative event platform. You can find out more about these on our Online and Digital Events pages. 

Background blur is available in Teams Live Events for presenters. Presenters can also change their background to a custom or preset background. 

Note - this setting is not available for producers, so you may want to make sure that your producers and presenters are separate people, so that producers do not need to switch their video on for attendees to see. 

Yes, presenters in Live Events can add backgrounds to their video feeds.

Currently, custom backgrounds are only available in Teams Live Events for internal presenters (University of Edinburgh users). External presenters can only use pre-added Microsoft backgrounds, or the blur background option.

The attendee Q&A is not recorded in the Live Event recording but the Q&A is available to download after the Live Event in the Q&A report.

You access this by clicking the live Event in your calendar, then clicking download beside the Q&A report.

Yes, but you will have to add the external user as a guest user of Teams before adding them as a presenter or producer. 

To do this you should either create a new Team for the Live Event or decide on a pre-existing Team, that the external user can be added as a guest to. Then follow these steps:

1. Click the Teams icon to the left of the Teams window and find the Team you want to add the guest user to
2. Click the more options ellipsis (3 dots) beside the Team name
3. Click "Add member" from the list
4. Type the guest user's email address into the box
5. An "Add X as a guest" button should appear below the email, click this button
6. Click the pen beside the name that has appeared
7. Add the guest user's name and click the tick button
8. Click the purple "Add" button 

You should then let your guest know to follow these steps:

1. Your guest will receive an invite email from Microsoft Team to the email address that you added to the Team
2. They should click the "Open Microsoft Teams" button in the email
3. This will open Microsoft Teams (note that if they do not have a Microsoft account they will be prompted to create one)
4. They will see a "Review permissions" page, they must click "Accept" to become a guest on our tenant
5. Remind your guest that before joining your Live Event they should open Teams and make sure that they switch to our tenant, to do this:
   • Either click the organisation name beside their profile picture / initials in the upper right of the Teams window  and select "University of Edinburgh (guest)" OR click their profile picture / initials and select "University of Edinburgh (guest)"

There is a known issue which means external users can have difficulty joining Live Events

You can try passing them on the following steps:

First, make sure the user has followed the prompts in the email sent to them when you added them as a guest to our tenant. If they have not done this, they must to so in order to access the Live Event. 

Next, the user should first make sure they are logged into Teams with the correct account. They must log in to Teams with the email address that was added as a guest user to a Team. The user should try logging in to Teams with this account on both the browser and desktop versions of Teams to avoid issues.

Then, the user should check they have changed over to our tenant. To do this:

• Open the Teams desktop app
• Then, either click the organisation name beside their profile picture / initials in the upper right of the Teams window  and select "University of Edinburgh (guest)" OR click their profile picture / initials and select "University of Edinburgh (guest)"
• Open the Teams Live Event email invitation
• Click the "Join" link in the email invitation 
• A new browser window will open
• Select the prompt to open / allow the Teams desktop app

Yes, producers and presenters can join the Live Event as early as they want to. It is good practice to ask your producers and presenters to arrive early to make sure everything is working correctly. 

Arriving early also allows producer(s) to set up the Live Event with a presenter video and/or shared content. 

Note - attendees will not see what is happening in the Live Event until you click "Start" to start the Live Event

You can see a list of participants during your Teams Live Event by clicking the participants button from the top right of the Live Event window, and a list of all current producers, presenters and attendees will appear. 

You can also access this list after the event through the "Attendee Engagement Report." To access this click your Live Event in your Teams Calendar, and you should see an option to download an attendee engagement report. 

Note - this may take from a few hours to a day to show up as available for download. 

This issue arises when users attempt to single click on Live Events in their calendar.

To resolve this issue and access the recordings and reports for your Live Events, you should double-click on the entry in your Teams calendar. 

This is entirely up to you. However, it can be easier for the producer(s) to have just one PowerPoint presentation file that they have open for the entire Live Event without having to change between PowerPoint presentation files. This can also avoid any unecessary delays in showing presentations for each presenter.