Select the right Microsoft 365 Live Events type best fitting your needs

Microsoft 365 includes 3 different options to execute Live Events: via Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Teams and Yammer. The 3 have their similarities, and also their differentiatiors. How-to select the Live Event type aka webcast solution that best fits your needs on a specific event? Microsoft itself does not really provide direction on this question, although they published how their own Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO) team deals with it:

(source: Improving employee engagement with live events in Microsoft 365)

A different angle you can utilize is to address it from the product side...

Use MS Teams Live Event, if:

• Your event audience is for public anonymous access;
• Your event audience includes external guests known in your Office 365 directory (via Azure B2B);
• Your event audience is for internal-only access AND you want to provide an inline conversation;
• It is allowed that the video recording is not stored in your own Office 365 tenant; (see)
• Your audience is guaranteed known before the live event starts; (see)
• There is no need to capture the conversation (Q&A) beyond the scope of the live event

Produce your MS Teams Live Event by:

• 'Self-production' / embedded encoder via MS Teams, if
  • You want to quickly setup the event, and have no requirements for advanced production quality (as animations, fade-in/fade-out; agumented reality, ....);
  • You as event organizer are confident to do the event production (camera, audio, PowerPoints, ...) yourself;
• Use 'External App production' via MS Teams, if:
  • You need advanced production quality to bring the message;
  • You're not confident to do the production yourself in MS Teams App;

Use MS Stream Live Event, if:

• Your event audience is for internal-only access, AND
  • you want to broadcast / send a communication message
  • your online audience size is larger, and you must protect your network from saturation via an eCDN solution
• You want a branded landings-page for the audience to join the live event;
• It is not allowed to store on-demand recording of the live event outside your own Office 365 tenant; (see)
• You need to be able to on-the-fly while live event already in progress, authorize + revoke authorization of persons to watch the live event;
• You want to easily capture the conversation (Q&A) beyond the scope of the live event; e.g. for trends analysis;

A variation on decision-tree to select proper live events type

Check / Differentiator Questions

1. What is the audience of your event: internal-only, or also outside your company? (with MS Stream not possible current>)
2. What is the size of your online audience? (as with larger, network optimization needed)
3. How sophisticated do you need the production quality of your event to be? (is the simplicity of MS Teams Live Event 'self-production' good-enough)
4. Do you have dedicated production equipment, or even a production company to produce the event via external encoder?
5. Do you need to provide a company-branded experience to join the live event?