By: Emely Chay, Product Trainer
Last week my Teams training was unexpectedly flooded with 250 users!
Our clients have been rapidly adopting Microsoft Teams to help bridge the gap that COVID-19 has created for many organizations in communication and collaboration. A few weeks ago, a customer reached out to request written or video content for Microsoft Teams. I sent the content over and a few days later they requested a live training for that same week. Usually we prefer 2-3 weeks lead-time to deliver a training, but under the circumstances we wanted to be as helpful as possible and deliver the training when they needed it, and so I accepted the live training request.
The customer and I had several email threads going back and forth leading up to the training, mostly focused on setting up the Teams meeting and making sure attendees were technically prepared. The content was confirmed and during a call we quickly discussed who the audience was and about how many people would be joining.
The response was, “It’s only the staff,” and that topic was swept under the rug as we discussed who would record the meeting and tested functionality.
On the day of the training, 16 minutes before showtime, I received an email from our client asking what would happen if we exceeded the 250 attendee limit of a Teams meeting. I called the client and said we have never exceeded 250 people in a Teams meeting, but that I assumed they would not be able to join.
His response was with a laugh, “We’re about to find out!”
At this point it was too late to reschedule or create a Live Event (which supports 10,000 attendees). It was time for the training to start, so we got off our call and jumped into the meeting.
I queued up my PowerPoint and prepared myself to begin the training. I watched the attendee list go up slowly from 15 attendees to over 100 and eventually 250! The training itself went very well, and we had someone from their IT department as moderator. There was a steady flow of questions coming in throughout the training, but they really started to pour in during the last 15 minutes. Even with our Teams meeting completely maxed out, with recording enabled, and chat flooded with questions, the experience was positive for everyone involved. No stuttering in the recording, and the meeting was surprisingly manageable even while maxed out.
It feels great knowing I was able to help so many users’ first Teams experience go as smooth as possible with our “Getting Started with Microsoft Teams” training, even while hitting the absolute maximum guests. But next time, we will make sure it’s a Live Event.