Town hall is a produced event the audience view only.
Webinar is a Teams meeting the audience can particiapte in.
Please see the ‘Best Tool’ Matrix table for more information on the differences. To help choose the right platform for your event?
Standard Town Hall allows for up to 10,000 people in the audience.
Advanced Town Hall allows for up to 20,000 people in the audience.
A Teams Premium license is required for the event organiser to be able to use the Advanced Town Hall features.
On request to the Microsoft Event Team the limit can be raised up to 100,000 people in the audience.
Please check the Microsoft link for the most up to date information.
Please follow the links to support information on NHSmail Support Site, Microsoft Guides and the Microsoft Event Playbook.
The NHSmail Digital Hero Community which provides a collaborative space for peer to peer support.
When creating a Town Hall the organiser can include the attendee details into the event. When the event is ready to be sent to the attendees, you publish the event to send the invitation to the attendees listed.
As of June 2024 the invitation does not use any BCC functions, so all event team members and attendees are listed in the invitation.
If you do not want the attendees to see this level of detail you have the option copy the attendee link out into a separate Outlook calendar invitation.
Microsoft are working on enhancements to the attendee invitation process.
Town hall includes a green room function where the event team can meet without the attendees seeing or hearing anything from the green room.
As of June 2024 the green room only works before the event starts. It provides a space for the event team to connect and check things like audio, video and screen share content, as well as discussing their plans for the event, before starting the event.
When the event is ended, this removes all participants from the event, there is no post event green room.
Microsoft are working on an enhancement to include a post event space for the event team to wrap up without being seen or heard by the attendees.
Yes, the organiser and co-organiser role can access the “manage event” screen within Teams and access the Registration section to download the attendance report.
The Microsoft 365 Roadmap has outlined a feature for downloading Q&A, which is currently rolling out in August 2024. This feature will allow event organizers to export the questions posed by attendees into a .CSV file.
Currently, there is no feature that supports the downloading of chat transcripts, and there is no mention of such a feature in future release items.
The video recording can be downloaded by the organiser and co-organiser roles. This is accessed via the “manage event” screen within Teams, in the Recordings section.
The organiser and co-organiser role can access the ‘Manage Event’ screen within Teams and access the Registration section to download the attendance report.
Teams Premium licensed users benefit from the Advanced Town hall ‘Event Insights’ which includes detailed information about the event from a more technical perspective.
By loading the attendance report and Event Insights into other services, such as Excel, Power BI or SharePoint Lists, there is the opportunity to trend / analyse information for recurring events across a time period.
Using the standard recording publishing feature in Town Hall this is not possible.
If the recording is uploaded into Microsoft Stream then this provides analytics on views. Stream is limited to internal (NHS.net) account access only.
During an event it is not possible to bring an event attendee into the event.
As of June 2024, only internal accounts (NHS.net) may be organiser and co-organiser accounts.
There is no producer role currently available in Town hall.
External accounts can be invited as an external presenter.
This depends on the type of event you are running and the knowledge and experience of the event team with Town hall, and to some degree the attendees.
Typically you would benefit from people fulfilling the following roles: event director, stage manager, content sharer, Q&A moderation / SME, “voice from above”.
As a minimum you would want two people producing the event, on the assumption both people are experienced with Q&A, stage management and content management.
There are a few ways to approach accessibility options for deaf attendees. This FAQ lists the options based on complexity for the event team to enable:
Auto closed-captions are always available to be enabled, this would be within the same event and available to all attendees.
A separate BSL only Town hall event could be setup where the BSL team are present to sign to the audience. This does bring additional challenges as this means those watching in the BSL room, need to also load the event room and watch both streams simulataneously. Often there is significant lag between the two events.
The best way is to bring the BSL team into the main event and then produce the event with a specific event management service, such as OBS, so the event scenes can be created and the BSL signing team can be positioned on screen for all to see. This means there is no lag, as the BSL is part of the main event.
CART captioning can be an alternative to BSL. This is a specific service which utilises a specially trained CART captioner to provide the captions for your event.
No. It is not possible to queue up content or presenters, and as soon as someone starts screen sharing, that content is visible to everyone.
Video streams are simply moved on and off stage. You can have up to 7 video streams (presenters) on a Town Hall live at any one time, alongside screen shared content.
As an organiser/producer you do not have a way to queue up or prepare a presenter that they are going to appear on screen. They are either on the stage or off the stage. When they are moved on to the stage, they see themselves on the stage and that is how they would know.
Whilst possible to communicate from the production team in the chat, this requires presenters to multi-task on many things and may result in a poorer event expeirence for all involved..
Yes. In a Town hall there is the meeting chat. The meeting chat is only for the event team. Organisers, co-organisers and presenters are all in that chat. This is a safe place to message each other before, during or after an event.
An event team could consider a backup communication route for larger events, such as a Teams chat or another commuication tool used by the team such as WhatsApp or Signal. Producer roles may also want a separate chat space away from presenters.
No. You would have to produce something in a PowerPoint or other tool, and share that content on the screen.
Microsoft have planned improvements to the way information is displayed on screen, specifically for presenters.
Need to come back to that one. the placeholder is…….
Non nhs.net accounts will not see the Q&A information during a Town Hall.
However guest .net accounts* should be able to see the Q&A.
* Guest .net accounts are truly onboarded guest accounts, for example partners with temporary nhs.net accounts.
Attendees to Town Hall can access the Q&A, there are no controls to prevent copying from the Q&A.
If controls are introduced in the future it is worth being aware they will not stop people screen snipping or taking a photo from an external device.
Yes, changes to the event details will send an email notification to all participants.
Best practise is to set up the event and core details excluding the attendees, make sure everything is locked in and finalised, then add your attendees and publish.
The person who creates the Town Hall event is the organiser. The minimum information needed to set up the event includes: co-organisers, presenters / external presenters, as well as the event name in the description.
Changing anyone including organisers, presenters and or anything to do with the date, time and the details will trigger an e-mail to those people.
The attendees can be added at a later point and the event published. Once the event is published, it goes out to the attendee group and any changes made after that point are distributed out to all attendees.
Town Hall follows the same processes for ‘Live Events’ but is dispayed slightly differently: The town Hall event is set up from the teams calendar.
A Town Hall takes it further by adding additional theming to auto emails (header image, icon and the core colour of the invite).
The organsiser can define who they want to invite, who can access the event, as well as theming. If you have a Teams Premium acount you can edit the email templates, otherwise it will be the standard templates.
As of June 2024
The maximum number of co-organisers on the invitation is 10.
There is not a specific “producer” role in Town Hall, you would use either the co-organiser or presenter role.
The maximum number of presenters on an invitation is 100.
PowerPoint live is not possible in a Town Hall. PowerPoint can instead be shared by selecting share screen or application within the Teams share control panel.
On the NHSmail shared tenant, the Town Hall function doesn’t have any restrictions in place. An organiser can create a Town Hall and can choose the audience type each Town Hall from internal only attendees (NHS.net accounts) or public access.
No, a Town Hall event cannot be created from a shared account. A shared account, a shared mailbox account doesn’t have a teams licence, so therefore can’t get to the Teams calendar.
Even if possible to create via add-ins in Outlook, creating a Town hall using a shared mailbox fundamentally causes issues, as the organiser account is not licensed and will not be able to perform many of the basic functions required for the event.
No.
When a presenter is using the share functionality they do not see this on the event stage, other members of the Event Team do see content on the stage.
The presenter sharing will not see the content on stage. If the presnter has a single monitor and is sharing content, typically the only thing seen is the content being shared sharing. If they have a dual monitor setup and put the event on one screen and sharing content on another, the presenter won’t see that screen sharing content appear on the stage, but everybody else in the event and the attendees will see it.
Live Event and Town hall are fundamentally the same, however there are some differences throughout the various stages of the event life cycle, to understand these differences, please view the recording of the webinar which covered transitioning from Live Event to Town Hall.
No, not natively through Town Hall or Teams. To shorten the invite link, you would need to use an external shortening service, such as Bitly, subject to trust approval and IG considerations.
No.There is no integrated tracking in Town hall.
When you are setting up the event details, if you include the attendees within the Town Hall event page and publish so it sends directly to those attendees, you do get the standard RSVP attendance tracking as per the normal outlook offer such as accepted, tentative, declined, no response.
Webinar does allow tracking, so could be an alternative consideration for events up to 1000 attendees.
Yes, from October 2024 the co-organiser role can edit details such as the event title, description, date and time and attendees (currently only the organiser).
See the recording for the ‘Best practice and guidance’ Webinar here, which includes tips.
Also see Microsoft’s event playbook, which also has a specific section for presenters, and information that covers things such as software set up on their device, wardrobe choices, lighting, lapel mics etc.
There isn’t a huge amount within Town Hall itself to help increase attendance.
Advertising the town hall in as many different communication routes that you have is recommended, along with encouraging stakeholders to remind people about the event.
There are some features for Webinar which Microsoft have on their roadmap to develop in Town Hall: When you set up the webinar it creates a registration page. The registration page must be filled out by the attendees in order to receive the webinar invitation. As part of that webinar life cycle, you can adjust the reminder for the event, such as how many weekdays or hours in advance that the reminder is sent.
There are no timelines published on these Webinar features coming to Town hall.
The attendees click the Town Hall meeting link which will launch the event through their teams application or the web.
A ‘public’ event does not require the teams application, it will use a web streaming service from Microsoft to watch the event.
If the attendees are included directly on the Town Hall details page, and the event is published, they will recieve a calendar invitation, from which they can access the link.
If the attendees are not added to the details page because the link is copied and sent by other means, attendees would follow the link from the email, newletter, web page and so on.
The best way to prepare for this, is seleting the appropriate share function:
There is the option to share a screen or share a window (a window means a specific application such as power point). So you could choose share window and then choose the PowerPoint presentation or the Internet browser or whatever it is that needs to be shared.
Then the presenter can move between that shared screen and the meeting controls to see the Q&A, without interrupting the screen share content to the attendees.
No.
Always be prepared!
If possible, download a copy of the video so it is on local storage and then play the video directly. This reduces interruption from adverts on things like YouTube, issues with buffering and loading of the video.
If you are sharing directly from YouTube or similar platform, and there are adverts etc, load up the video, watch a minute or two, and then restart the video to hopefully avoid any adverts. Also consider browser extensions such as AdBlock, you may need to work with local IT to add browser extensions.
The perons sharing the video should have a strong internet connection, ideally wired, or a known good WiFi.
The Teams screen share control panel, appears at the top of the shared screen/app, is by default is minimised. When you select share, it expands revealing two buttons that you want to consider: The first is a toggle to include system audio. The other one, a new release from Microsoft, is optimised screen sharing for video. The best advice is to turn that on only when you’re sharing video and turn it off when you stop sharing. This effectively tells Microsoft Teams to improve the screen sharing for a higher frame rate capture. Typically the Teams screen share is about 15 frames per second, but a video might be 30 or 60 frames a second, resulting in a lag for attendees. By turning that video optimise on, and then starting to play the video, it should be a smoother experience for the attendees.
Yes, if the attendee’s are included directly on the Town Hall details page, and the event is published, they will recieve a calendar invitation. This includes co-organisers, presenters (internal and external) and attendees.
If the attendees are not added to the details page then you must copy the link and send by other means, e.g. you could send a calendar invitation in the normal way through Outlook.
When attendees are invited to the town hall directly, an ordinary meeting invitation that is sent to invitees. Therefore, all named people on that event (organiser, co-organiser, presenters and attendees) can see everyone listed.
If not suitable for your event, then the attendees would have to be sent the invitation out separately. For example, using the copy link function, adding the link to an email and BCCing all recipients or alternatively, adding the link to newletters, websites and so on.
Microsoft are working on improvements, such as “Ability to block Attendee Emails from Teams Town Halls” which may help improve the privacy controls for the invitation stage.
Yes. Q&A can be turned open or closed at any point in the meeting.
There are two toggles that you need to turn off to cloase the Q&A:
The first toggle is ‘questions’. This will stop participants from submitting questions until you toggle it back on. Note: this also stops presenters from posting questions or items.
The other toggle is the ‘replies’. Once toggled ‘off’, participants won’t be able to reply to questions or items posted. Again impacting presenters ability to reply.
If you want to completely close the Q&A for a period of time during a session in progress, you need to turn off questions and replies, and then when you’re ready to turn those back on, you can turn both or one of them on as needed.
Best practice is to also close the Q&A at the end of the event, unless you will be accessing the Q&A periodically after the event to capture any new raised items.
Check the Microsoft 365 Roadmap using the following link, which is filtered to Town hall already.
At the time of writing, August 2024, there are no additional languages listed.
Town Hall does not currently include the production role, therefore it is the organiser and coorganiser roles that must be applied to replicate the producer’s role from live event.
No. When a presenter is added to the event, it will send a reminder and updated event details to everyone listed in the event details. It is recommended that the event details are confirmed and checked before adding recipients.
Alternatively, to avoid attendees recieving updates, copy the link and sent it to attendees rather than listing them in the event.
Planned improvements to Town hall, such as “Ability to block Attendee Emails from Teams Town Halls”, may offer a way to achieve this.
In the NHSmail shared tenant, which is the nhs.net domain, we are all seen as one organisation ‘nhs.net’. ‘Presenters in your organisation’ includes all nhs.net accounts, even across multiple organisations.
For example, someone who works at Leicester, who has an NHS.net account creates an event in the NHSmail, shared tenancy. Someone else with a nhs.net account in Nottingham or Cornwall are also part of the same organisation.
When the event ends the organiser and co-organiser roles can go in and publish the recording to the attendees.
The organiser and co-organiser also have the opportunity to download the recording, make any edits and upload the recording to the event page before publishing.
Once published the recording will be temporarily uploaded to a Microsoft Streaming site to host. The recording is available for a limited time, which the organisers can extend through the town hall and webinar event management pages.
The organiser and co-organisers also have the option to download the recording and upload to thier relevant storage / video hosting location of their choice. This provides options to choose to download and store the recording in an appropriate place rather than publishing via Microsoft, if they wish.
The best way to anonymise an invitation, is to send the link out as a separate email with addresses BCC’d.
Planned improvements from Microsoft, such as “Ability to block Attendee Emails from Teams Town Halls” may offer alternatives when using the Publish Event function within the Town hall event.
Yes it is possible. A more detailed explanation is below explaining some best practice.
A Town Hall has two stages to change co-organisers or presenters.
When a new town hall is created, the details page, is where the date and time of the event, and then the description are set, as well as adding co-organisers and presenters (internal and external). Upon completion, there is a save and send button. This creates the event and sends the invitation to organiser, co-organiser(s) and presenter(s) that have been added.
The Town Hall event set up screen has a separate section for attendees. This is where the event privacy is set for internal only, public or specific internal accounts only.
When the event is ready to be published, select ‘Publish’. This sends the invite out to all your attendees that you’ve listed in the event details page, as well as again to your co-organisers and presenters.
It is still possible to adjust the attendees, the co-organiser(s) and the presenter(s) even after you’ve saved or published the event, sending an updated email each time you save a change.
Be aware that once published it is not possible to adjust the event privacy.
No the link does not change. Also it is not possible to re-publish, just saving changes to the event, which sends an updated event to all event participants.
When sharing content, yes the control panel remains at the top.
There is an enhancement from Microsoft currently rolling out which allows the person sharing content to relocate the control panel to anywhere else on their monitor.
Yes in Outlook (Classic) using the Teams meeting add-in you have the option to create many Teams meeting / event types. From your Outlook calendar, where the Teams meeting icon appears, choose the drop down arrow and then select Town hall.
No in Outlook (New). It is not currently possible to create a Town hall in Outlook (New) or Outlook on the web. You will need to use Teams application to create a Town hall.
Live polling is not currently possible within a Town Hall.
To use live polling within a webinar for an internal audience, you can use the integrated forms service to pre prepare forms that you can launch during your webinar attendees to respond to during the session. It does not work with external attendees.
Yes in Outlook (Classic) using the Teams meeting add-in you have the option to create many Teams meeting / event types. From your Outlook calendar, where the Teams meeting icon appears, choose the drop down arrow and then select Town hall.
No in Outlook (New). It is not currently possible to create a Town hall in Outlook (New) or Outlook on the web. You will need to use Teams application to create a Town hall.
Yes, the organiser and co-organiser can access the event from their teams calendar. Head to the recording section to download a copy of the recording.
No. Consider using Teams webinar or teams meetings if you need breakout room functionality, breakout rooms only work when less than 300 people are in the meeting / webinar.
Town hall for the event team (organiser, co-organisers, presenters) is laid out differently than Live Event. All event teams videos can be seen within the event teams view, however the way they are displayed is to the left of the stage area, in a horizontal display. Limited to around 4 videos per page.
The stage can accommodate up to 7 videos plus shared content, being broadcasted to your attendees.
When acting in the role of camera / stage operator, where there are more than 5 people in the event, you would be advised to use the “pin for me” function on the video feeds, or in the people roster menu, to keep the presenters at the top of your video pages to allow you to more quickly bring people on/off stage.
Yes. Create your iCal ICS file in the normal way and simply paste the attendee link into that the iCal before sending. That would allow people to click the link to join. If it is for external attendees, you would also have to make sure that the event was set to public.
On our tenant (that’s the whole NHSmail Microsoft environment) we can host up to 50 consecutive Events (Live Event / Town Hall). The central NHSmail team monitor the concurrent usage of the technology, however as events can be created at short notice it can be possibkle for this limit to be exceeded. If this occurs the 51st and beyond event which attempts to go live, will fail to go live.
Right now we see, at most, 4 events a day, so we are not too concerned. However the fact Town Hall is available to everyone (Live Event was managed access on a per account basis) and there is increased training and awareness of Town hall to explain the function we need to make sure Town Hall is used for the right type of events and other events are setup via Teams Meetings / Webinars where appropriate.
If your events are expected to have less than 1000 live attendees then it would be strongly suggested to use a Webinar or Teams meeting to run the event. Both Webinar and Meetings allow specific customisation to achieve similar outcomes as the Town hall function.
Information correct at the time of writing, August 2024.
When a presenter is on stage and their video is on, their name and organisation does not appear during the live event broadcast.
But it does appear on the recording.
It is not otherwise possible to edit.
Captions are auto generated and it is not possible to adjust them live.
It is possible to replace the auto captions by using a CART captioning service which requires an external third party paid for provider that would incorporate CART captions into your event, it is unlikely an organisation would have these skills in-house.
After the event has finished, the recording has the captions automatically generated.
The recording is automatically stored on the Microsoft Stream service and you can open and edit those captions alongside the recording via Microsoft Stream and save those so that they appear as part of the recording captions.
| Last Reviewed Date | 05/11/2024 |
