New presentation features in Teams, coming later this month and announced at Microsoft Ignite 2021, are all designed to make it easy to look more professional in meetings and build in advanced effects into Teams itself. Presenter Mode adds features to allow you to add yourself into the presentation, PowerPoint Live makes life easier when showing slides, and webinars finally become a core part of Teams.
In 2020, the pandemic forced The Experts Conference (TEC) to switch from an in-person to a virtual event. This article dives into the real practical challenges I faced turning a highly engaging in-person event into a successful virtual one using the Teams platform. I'll explain why we chose and how we used Microsoft Teams, the personnel required to pull this off, including the tenant administrator's critical role, an overview of the technical environment, and several of the significant technical/delivery gotchas we had to live with or workaround.
Microsoft has released several improvements to Teams meetings to make these gatherings more functional and easier to use. The features range from giving video feeds priority in the gallery view to reactions in meetings to allow participants to show what they really think about a presentation. It's all grist to the mill in the battle for corporate online meeting domination between Teams and Zoom.
