Microsoft to Postpone Shutting Down Teams' LiveEvents, Adds New Features to TownHall

TapTechNews May 29th news, Microsoft announced in September 2023 that it will shut down the LiveEvents online meeting service of Teams on September 30, 2024 , but the official announced the postponement today, but did not announce the exact postponement time.

TapTechNews translated the content of Microsoft support documentation as follows

Through communication with customers, we understand how important it is to smoothly transition and migrate to the TownHall function.

We are committed to providing customers with as much convenience and benefits as possible, allowing them to try, adopt and implement TownHall as the destination of large-scale digital activities, and enabling customers to upgrade from LiveEvents to TownHall according to their own plans.

The official description of Teams' LiveEvents function by Microsoft is as follows:

Teams Live Events is an extension of Teams meetings, which enables users to broadcast video and meeting content to a large network audience. Live Events is a one-to-many communication, and the event host leads the interaction, and the main way for the audience to participate is to view the content shared by the host.

Participants can watch live or recorded events in VivaEngage or Teams, and interact with the presenter using &A or VivaEngage conversations.

Microsoft said that in the last quarter, there was a'significant increase in new customers' of the new function TownHall in Teams. Microsoft plans to add new features to TownHall in the next few months:

Participants will soon be able to express their feedback and participation through real-time reactions and streaming chat, and presenters can also interact with the audience by raising their hands.

Advanced production experiences such as the producer role, shared content queue, and preview scene support will also appear in TownHall, thereby raising the event execution ability to a new level.

Microsoft also plans to add functions similar to Teams LiveEvents to TownHall in the next 12 months. This includes functions such as queuing shared content, previewing scenes, and adding the producer role.

TownHall will also add more interactive and participation functions, such as voting, question archiving, methods of exporting questions to CSV files, and downloading Q&A reports.