Microsoft Teams Will Soon Become Your Go-To Webinar Solution

There has been quite a bit of news this week as Microsoft hosts its annual Ignite conference, but some items stand out from the crowd more than others. In this instance, Microsoft casually mentioned that they will be introducing a new ‘webinar’ feature into Teams.

Coming later this year, Teams will support webinar registration and reporting. With this feature, organizers will be able to use event registration with (automated) reminder emails before an event starts and then following the webinar, view detailed analytics.

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While not everyone will need this functionality, this is a big announcement. For many large (and small) organizations, including Petri.com, we host quite a few webinars and utilize third-party services like GoTo Webinar.

Once this feature is rolled out, and thoroughly tested for the user experience, it should be possible for Petri and many other organizations to transition to Teams for this type of community activity and reduce our expenses for software licenses for other platforms.

Considering how big the Teams’ footprint has become in the business world, this feature could cause significant blowback to existing platforms that specialize in this segment. Webinars are used across the marketing and education world as a way to engage with an audience and are becoming more popular as in-person events have been sidelined in 2020 and likely in 2021.

Microsoft is saying that this feature should arrive sometime later this year but when it will reach your specific tenant is another question altogether. That being said, once this feature does roll-out, we will have a deeper dive to better understand its features and limitations.