Best Practice for Large Meetings:

A good estimate for a large Teams meeting is 300 or more attendees. If you schedule a large online meeting or expect more than 300 people, the following are options and best practices for a more successful large meeting.

Note: Up to 1,000 invitees can now join a Teams meeting and interact by using chat, audio, and video. Invitees can also join a meeting that already has 1,000 participants (up to 10,000) as view-only attendees.

First, based on the type of meeting (or webinar or event) that you want to create or is best suited for your presentation, you can either schedule a Teams meeting, a Teams webinar, or a Teams live event. A Teams meeting is a collaborative and interactive experience with the option to add structure for larger meetings. A Teams webinar is a structured event with interactivity. A Teams live event is a broadcast scenario with a production team behind the scenes and a viewing audience.

Helpful Tips: Before a large meeting

• Present the meeting from a wired connection or network for better and more reliable audio and video.
• Create polls to gather information about attendees.
• In Meeting options, do the following:

1. To the right of Who can present?, select Specific people. Then, next to Select presenters for this meeting, select Search for participants. Choose the people that you want as presenters in your meeting (from within your organization only). Note that after a meeting has started, presenters can promote other attendees as presenters.
2. To the right of Allow mic for attendees? switch the toggle to No. If someone needs to interact during the meeting, either allow them to unmute when they raise their hand or change their role by hovering over their name and selecting More options …
3. For more info, see Manage attendee audio and video permissions.
4. When you’re done with these settings, select Save.

During a large meeting

• Use Spotlight a video to highlight a single presenter to make them stand out (Note that Spotlight can’t be used in Large Gallery or Together Mode).
• Meeting organizers and presenters can change participant settings for attendees, such as allowing them to unmute or promoting them as presenters.
• Remind and encourage attendees to raise their hands before speaking and to use live reactions.
• Create polls during the meeting to get feedback from attendees.

More things to know

• When a meeting reaches 1,000 attendees, the meeting organizer and presenters will see a banner indicating that new attendees will join as view-only.
• View-only attendees can’t join a meeting if view-only isn’t available and they aren’t allowed to bypass the lobby.
• Breakout rooms can’t be created in meetings that have more than 300 attendees, even if the number of attendees drops to fewer than 300 during the meeting. Also, creating breakout rooms in a meeting automatically limits the number of meeting attendees to 300.