How-To include an external as presenter in Teams Live Event

When it comes to organizing a webcast, Microsoft 365 offers multiple options: Teams Meeting, Stream Live Event, Teams Live Event, Yammer Live Event. Each with their own differentiating characteristics, and you can select which best fits the specifics of your planned event. A significant differentiator of Teams Live Event is that you can extend beyond internal audience only. Either full public open, or still restricted audience by inviting externals as authorized via Azure AD B2B in your tenant. In the B2B guest model, the external access into the Live Event can then be secured by multi-factor authentication (MFA), to protect the company information shared for external access only in trusted context.

A pleasant discovery I did this week is that the authorized external involvement also extends to the Presenter role: you can include in the set of event presenters also identified people from outside your own organization.

The enabling conditions:

1. The Live Event must be produced via Teams itself, not produced by External app or device. Reason is that the latter delegates to MS Stream for processing and delivery, and that Microsoft 365 service up today sadly still does not support external access;
2. The external person must be known in your tenant, either as Azure AD B2B guest or via Teams Federation;
3. The Live Event organizer / producer must invite the external person via his/her external guest identity in the Presenter role;
4. The external person must be authorized as member to a Teams instance in your tenant
5. And as first crucial: to be allowed in the Live Event as presenter, the external person must at the presentation time switch in Teams to your tenant. Without this step, the external person sees in own Teams calendar the Live Event as meeting; but when trying to join that from own tenant will be blocked with notification
   "This event is in <external-tenant>. To join, you'll need to be in that org,too."
   If the organizing tenant has enabled MFA as conditional access rule, the external person will be challenged for that before secure and governed allowed access in the organizing tenant.
   
6. And second crucial: to actively join the live event the external person cannot go from Teams calendar once switched to the organizing tenant as it is not administrated there for the external person. Workaround is to join the 'external live event' via the invitation mail that the external person received in the own mail inbox when the Live Event organizer identified the external as an event presenter. Click on 'Join Live Event' seamless opens the Teams App of the external person in the internal producer/presenter meeting of the Teams Live Event within the organizing tenant. As result of the tenant-switch (previous step), the external person is now namely already authenticated and known in the organizing tenant.

After following the above steps, the external person is from perspective of the Teams Live Event organization just another presenter, who is authorized and enabled to share video and content in the event. And can communicate with the producer + other presenters in the chat of the internal Teams meeting to align on the event production.

From the perspective of the organizing producer, (s)he remains in control to determine which content of the presenters included in the Teams Live Event production to actual put live for the audience. The final control remains thus within the organization hosting the live event to its invited audience - internals, potential authorized guests, or full public-open.