All about Town Halls in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft announced Town Halls at the end of September 2023. Let's gather everything we know about it.

What is Town Hall in Teams?

Town Hall is the name of a new virtual experience for big meetings. This is also the functionality that replaces Teams Live Events in 2024.

Below you can find the list of features available for Town Halls:

Unified experience similar to Teams meetings
Third-party eCDN support
💎Teams Premium adds Microsoft eCDN support that includes real-time monitoring (attendee count, peak concurrency, session duration, geographic locations, and undefined more)
Green room with dedicated chat (this feature will also be added to meetings and webinars)
Manage what attendees see
Hide participant list
RTMP-in
RTMP-out
Structured Q&A
On-demand recording
Email communications (💎Teams Premium adds email customization)
Attendee reporting
Live translated captions from English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Chinese
💎Teams Premium adds German, Italian, Korean, and Russian for translated captions

What are the limitations of Town Halls?

Up to 10,000 attendees (💎20,000 in Teams Premium)
Up to 15 concurrent events across the tenant (💎50 in Teams Premium)
Maximum duration of the event: 30 hours
Content is delayed about 15 seconds for attendees (source)

What features were announced for Town Halls?

External presenters (planned for the end of October)
Rewind and pause during the event (planned for coming months)
Viewing the town hall in Viva Engage (planned for coming months)
PowerPoint Live (source)

How do you create a Town Hall in Teams?

To create a Town Hall, go to calendar in Teams and choose Town hall from the New meeting dropdown:

Choosing Town Hall from the New meeting dropdown

If you do not see Town hall option, that functionality is blocked for you (or the entire organization) by an admin policy.

When will Teams Live Events retire?

The announcement post describes the retirement timeline for Live Events:

After September 30, 2024, Teams Live Events will no longer be supported, and access will be discontinued. Customers will not be able to schedule, start, or join any events on Teams Live Events after this date. Existing recordings will be available to access until December 31, 2024.

For government customers, the date is yet to be announced.

It is currently not clear what will be the limits for Live Events in 2024. Currently, limits are temporarily increased until December 31, 2023. That includes:

Event support for up to 20,000 attendees
50 events can be hosted simultaneously across a tenant
Event duration of 16 hours per broadcast
Live events with up to 100,000 attendees planned through the Microsoft 365 Live Event Assistance Program

What is the green room experience for Town Halls?

In the announcement post we have the green room experience screenshot:

We can see controls to start and end the meeting. We also have the red rectangle showing the content that will be presented to attendees when the meeting starts.

What are the admin settings for Team Hall in Teams?

All the settings about Town Halls are held in the Teams events policy. They can be changed using Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy cmdlet. The available settings are:

AllowTownhalls - can either be Enabled (default value) or Disabled
AllowedTownhallTypesForRecordingPublish - possible values are None, InviteOnly, EveryoneInCompanyIncludingGuests, Everyone (default value)
TownhallChatExperience - can be Optimized (default value) or None The setting to allow town halls is self-explanatory. The AllowedTownhallTypesForRecordingPublish manages types of Town Hall where attendees can have recordings published.

Chat experience setting controls whether the town hall organizer can enable Comment Stream chat experience.

Resources

Below you can find link to the resources about Town Hall:

Introducing Town Halls in Microsoft Teams and Retiring Microsoft Teams Live Events - Microsoft Community Hub
Technical guidance and support resources
Live Event Assistance Program - regardless the name, it also covers Town Halls

Some support articles are already available:

Roadmap items

There are two items describing Town Halls available in the roadmap: 123148: Microsoft Teams: Town Halls and 173182: Microsoft Teams: Team Halls (Premium).

Message Center entries

So far, one Message Center entry was published about Town Hall: MC678002 Introducing Microsoft Teams Town hall (non-admin link). The other entry describes Live Events retirement: MC678003 Microsoft Teams Live Event Retirement (non-admin link).

Summary

Town Hall seems to be a promising feature, solving the main issue we had with Live Events - a different interface. Will it fulfill the expectations? We shall see in the upcoming weeks.