Microsoft Teams was used as an event platform to host a large virtual marathon event with over 12,000 attendees from 155 countries. The event included over 400 sessions delivered via Teams Live Events over 24 hours. Attendees could view sessions, ask questions, and participate from desktop, web, and mobile applications. Insights from analytics tools showed over 31,000 total views of event sessions. Lessons learned included needing better pre-event experience, management of speaker schedules and live events, and post-event file sharing and recordings. Upcoming improvements to Teams will add features like breakout rooms, webinar registration, and increased team member limits.

1. Microsoft Teams as an
Event Platform: Case Study
for Large Scale Virtual
Events

2.  Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon
 How we did it and How it went Metrics
 Producing Live Events
 Live Event Architecture
 Q & A
Agenda

4. Live event architecture
Cloud delivery
Azure Media Services
Content Delivery Network
Network delivery
(3rd party eCDN)
Produce using app/device
Producer
OBS Studio
RTMP Device
Schedule
Organize
Organizer
Presenter nPresenter 1
Produce using Teams
Presenter(s)
Going Live
Produce
Producer
Watch on desktop, web, mobile
View
Watch
Audience

5. Teams Meetings and Teams Live Events
Teams Meetings
Think rich, interactive, impromptu or reoccurring, simple
 Good for small to medium group conversations
 Good for impromptu meet now
 Plans for 1000 interactive attendees (300+)
 Great for video. Attendees control audio and video
 You CAN Record to Stream
Teams Live Events
Think webinar, broadcast, structured and scale up
 Live large scale video “webinar” style solution for the enterprise
 Role based: Organizer, Producer, Speaker, Attendee
 Connects tens of thousands of participants
 READ only Browser or Mobile App
 few-to-many communications
 Autorecord Video

6. DEMO Producer Experience & Guides –
 Discussion by Galen Keene

7. Live Events Supported Platform
Desktop Web Mobile
Producer Yes No No
Presenter Yes No No
Attendee Yes Yes Yes (Mobile
Authenticated only)
 Teams and Skype Room Systems and Surface Hubs can only support live event presenters.
 Mobile will turn any other roles into attendee only
 PC and MAC no problem. Android and iOS in mobile app for attendees. Linux isn't supported for live events.

8. Core Team: Executive Producer Organizers

9. Language Track Leads
French – Patrick & Serge
Korean - OliviaPortuguese - Rodrigo
Japanese - Ai
Spanish – Juan & Vladimir
German - Hans

10. 5 #M365VM Session Stats
 415 Sessions from 355 Speakers
 Microsoft Keynote ever 4 hours
 Session breakouts for 3 hours
following
 50 Minute sessions with 10 min break
78
71 66 61
42
9 5
SESSION
Audience Session
Breakdown
Business Admin Dev Power User
End User Exec Diversity

11. M365VM Technology Stack
Attendee RegistrationEventbrite
Speaker Management & SchedulingSessionize
Event site, Speaker bio, Schedule, click to joinGitHub Pages
Marketing Community outreachTwitter, FB, LI & SPSEvents
Session Delivery PlatformTeams Live Events
Ask the Experts, Vendor Booths, Backup of failed Live sessionTeams Meetings
Feedback SurveysMicrosoft Forms
Twitter Sentiment and ReachtyGraph
Community ZoneAltSpaceVR

12. DEMO GitHub Pages – M365VM Site
 Demo by Ryan Schouten

13. Power BI - Session Search:
https://bit.ly/m365Marathon

14. Attendees
 12,774 attendees
 115 different countries

15. How we did… M365VirtualMarathon.com Site Stats (Azure Site)
M365VM Stats
Registered Attendees 12,750
Teams Events Attendance
Views
31,701
Users on Web Page 26,894
Speakers 350
Sessions 410
Languages 7

16. Total Views Teams Attendance Report
Session Views (first full block) Attendee Views
VM 1-1 1235
VM 2-1 935
VM 3-1 837
VM 4-1 780
VM 5-1 417
VM 6-1 931
VM 7-1 610
VM 8-1 1103
VM 9-1 246
VM 10-1 1016
VM 11-1 430
VM 12-1 720
VM 13-1 458
VM 14-1 1125
French 675
Japanese 1 & 2 1189 & 567 / 2463 Overall
Portuguese 107
German 145
Spanish 1 & 2 221 & 71 / 486 Overall
Korean 220
Total Teams Attendee Views 31,701

17. Attendee Experience:

18. Lesson Learned
 Pre and Post Live experience is very poor for users. Start early!
 Clicking END too final
 Staging experience for speaker 2 can be poor. Need to plan for speakers and tech checks to be in sync.
 Need scripting or PowerShell/Graph APIs for creation and management of live events
 Attendance Reports & Recordings – difficult to work with the recordings files to split them and to download
them (all have the same name). Very manual process to download, crop and upload.
 Need ability to share files to attendees like slide deck, handouts and even recording
 Need ability to view all rooms, comments and channels for an event.

19. Virtual Community Launch
Party
* Pre-Ignite Community Party
* Ignite – Community Social Event

20. Choose Your Own Adventure
Music
DJ Joey Snow
Summertime Mix
Music of Keith Richey
Talk
Lightning
Talks
Panels
Geek Out
Cosplay
Trivia

21. SharePoint spaces 3D/360 Launch Party Lobby
There’s always something fun going on!

23. What’s New and Coming in Teams (Ignite 2020)
“Together Mode Scenes”

24. What’s New and Coming in Teams (Ignite 2020):
“Custom Layouts!”

25. What’s New and Coming in Teams (Ignite 2020):
“Breakout Rooms!”

26. New and Coming Post Ignite & 2021
Webinar registration and reporting - event registration with
automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance, plus post
event detailed reporting dashboard for attendee engagement.
25K member teams
While there isn’t a limit on the number of people in a Teams tenant,
team membership is currently limited to 10,000 members. Plans to
increase this to support up to 25,000 members per individual team.
Microsoft Ignite 2020: Teams Blog post:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-microsoft-ignite-2020/ba-p/1665600

27. Hybrid and Physical Features
Meeting room capacity notifications
Using data from meeting room cameras equipped with people-
counting technology, alerts participants if room is over capacity based
on capacity data defined by the IT administrator for social distancing.
FastTrack Benefit Rooms (2)
Teams Rooms Panels

28. Rate my session & calls to action
https://euroteamsug.com/TeamsFestFeedback
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session
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29. Questions: Contact Us
Joel Oleson – Joel.Oleson@perficient.com
Ryan Schouten – Ryan@sharepointknight.com
Galen Keene – galen.keene@butterflytech.net