How to Digitally Transform a Brick and Mortar Conference Using Microsoft Teams

Every year I organize a technology conference at O’Dea High School for local educators. This year, due to the COVID 19 epidemic, I faced a challenge that many event organizers are facing; how to move forward with an important event while maintaining social distancing. I had worked for months bringing together experts, collaborating with faculty, advertising to local schools, and working to gain approval for clock hours and didn’t want all that work to go to waste. School leaders were counting on this event as a Professional Development option for their educators and educator were counting on this event for training.

I faced a challenge that many event organizers are facing; how to move forward with an important event while maintaining social distancing.

In some respects, I was lucky. Microsoft Teams was one of the main technologies highlighted at the conference and it was also the perfect platform to use to deliver a remote conference. With effective communication and some slight adjustments, conference team was able to pivot the conference from a brick and mortar event to an on-line event in less than a week using Microsoft Teams, despite having many novices of the software presenting and attending the conference. The conference went off very smoothly and an added bonus was that we were able to record all of the sessions for attendees and those who were not able to make it.

 I was truly impressed with the ease of using Microsoft Teams to deliver an excellent Professional Development experience, and happy to say that in the three days before the conference our audience expanded from 90 local educators to 250 worldwide educators – adding new perspectives and energy to the conference.

I wanted to share my learning of this process as I have had many requests to help others move their PD events on-line. This article lays out the process step by step and offers some resources to help you on your way.

Advertise and Register Attendees

I used Adobe Spark for the Conference Web Page and Jotform for the form collection. I have a Gold Subscription with JotForm that permits me to collect fees through a payment integration. For those in Office 365 who don’t need to collect fees, you can easily get registration using Microsoft Sway as your website and Microsoft Forms for collecting registration data. Be sure to collect an email from every participant as you will need it to add them to your Team.

Prepare a Microsoft Team for the conference

1. Create a Microsoft Team
2. Apply as open permissions as possible to allow all guests and members to contribute, but limiting their ability to delete or add channels.
3. Create channels for Keynotes and Sessions and if you want them in order use numbers as the first thing in the channel name, Microsoft Teams orders channels Alpha Numerically.
4. Use the general channel for announcements and conference materials. It will always be at the top.
5. Add all presenters to the Team as owners
6. Add internal attendees. You can add attendees in bulk using internal distribution groups.
7. Add external attendees using their email addresses. This process must be done one by one; however I was able to add over 200 attendees rather quickly by cutting and pasting from an excel file.

Prepare Keynote

The Keynote is best run through a Microsoft Teams Live Event. You will need a producer and at least one presenter. Attendees can interact through a Q & A chat bar, but this method suits a more “Stand and Deliver” form of presentation and allows far more attendees to view than a regular Teams Meeting. Check out Mark Sparvell’s Keynote for O’Dea’s Conference.

Prepare Sessions

For sessions you will want to schedule “Meet Now” meetings in the session channels set up in Teams. When scheduling these sessions, attendees added to the team will receive a calendar invite to the session with a link. These sessions allow more interaction between attendees. A good example of this interaction is seen in Mike Tholfsen’s session from the conference.

During the Event

1. Organizer can send reminders to entire group through Microsoft Teams or Email. Microsoft Teams makes a group email for the Team.
2. Organizers can start recordings for all sessions, which will automatically be uploaded to Microsoft Stream.
3. Create a few “meet now” unsessions for attendees to be social, engage in side conversations, and network.

After the event

1. Use an on-line form to collect feedback. I used jotform and was able to create automatic emails that send CEUs to attendees who met the requirements after submission of feedback.
2. Download session videos from Microsoft Stream and upload to and open platform such as YouTube or Vimeo to share.
3. Continue to use the Conference Team to collaborate with attendees and build community. You could use the same Team to deliver next year’s conference or sessions.

Want to collaborate on transforming your conference to an On-Line event using Microsoft Teams? Contact me through LinkedIn