Overview of Teams Webinars

Microsoft Teams Webinars allow you to host structured, registration-based events with clear roles for organizers, presenters, and attendees. At the University of Waterloo, all active students, staff, and faculty with an A5 Microsoft 365 license can schedule a webinar. Anyone (including external participants) can register for and attend a scheduled UW webinar, depending on the organizer’s registration settings.

For more information, please see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-teams-webinars-42f3f874-22dc-4289-b53f-bbc1a69013e3.

This article includes:

• How are Teams webinars different from Teams meetings?

• Create/Schedule a Teams webinar

• Registration experience

  • Organizer

  • Presenter

  • Registrant

Other articles that might be useful:

• Change webinar details -If you need to change details of a scheduled seminar, see this article for instructions on how to inform the presenters, and the attendees.

• Download an attendance report.

How are Teams webinars different from Teams meetings? 

Teams webinars 

• Typically used for: controlled discussions among meeting participants with clear roles (presenters and attendees)

• Attendee registration required to attend

  • if you have not registered and received the link to the Webinar you will need to register before you can join. It can take up to 15 minutes for you to receive the registration confirmation email, after which you can join by clicking the join the meeting link

• As the organizer, it is similar to being an owner of a regular Teams meeting. The organizer can help to control the meeting so the presenter can focus on presenting

• As a presenter, it is similar to being an owner of a regular Teams meeting allowing desktop sharing and other controls

Teams meetings 

• Typically used for: back-and-forth discussion and collaboration between meeting host(s) and participants

• No attendee registration required to attend 

Create/schedule a Teams webinar

Step by step

1. In your Teams calendar, select the arrow to the right of New meeting and then select Webinar.

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2. Modify the Basic info section. Setting webinar details such as title, date and time, and description.

3. Modify the Event group section. Assigning any other co-organisers or presenters. If you do not do this now, the presenter will not have presenter rights when joining the meeting and will need to be manually promoted by the organizer.

4. Modify the Event access section. Selecting whether the webinar is within the organisation or public.

5. Click Save.

6. Update registration form, select Configuration under the Registration drop down on the left-hand side. Select form requirements using the Add field button.

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7. Click Publish site when you are ready for others to see the event.

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8. Copy event link to share with participants.

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More information can be found in this article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/schedule-a-webinar-0719a9bd-07a0-47fd-8415-6c576860f36a

Registration experience

Organizer

• registration report can be pulled via the meeting details page in the Teams client. See this article for information on how to download a registration report https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-and-download-a-webinar-attendance-report-a29785c1-6b0f-437d-b03f-49506d0a7fa6 (Note that a .csv file is downloaded each time the registration report is run)

• attendance report is also available from the chat, however it does not contain registration data

• if you need to update the webinar, you need to remember to update both the meeting and the webinar registration page separately

• even though registration is required to join, if you do not want the registration open to anyone other than the users you send it to, you must manually turn off the ability to forward the meeting by unchecking Allow forwarding

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Presenter

• presenters must be added to the meeting calendar entry under the presenters section

• added presenters will receive a typical meeting invitation email to approve or decline

• presenters do not have access to registration report and must request from organizer if required

• has access to meeting registration URL, but no access to edit/update

• presenters can also register for the webinar, but it is not required

Registrant

• if the organizer requires participants to be part of UWaterloo organization

  • these attendees can load the link into their browser while authenticated to UWaterloo

  • if you open this in a browser session that is not authenticated to the UWaterloo organization (a personal Microsoft account for example), the page will be blank

• if the organizer has opened the webinar to anyone, then a personal account would work

• register by completing the form

• confirmation email will be sent up to 15 minutes later containing:

  • ICS calendar file

  • link to the teams meeting hosting the webinar

• if an update to the webinar details is made by the webinar organizer, an email is sent to all current registrants including a new ICS (i.e. calendar entry)

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