What it does

A webinar is a Teams event of up to 1,000 interactive attendees with an event page, a registration form, unique join links and organiser-controlled emails. Attendees keep mic, camera, chat, polls and Q&A, so it sits between a normal meeting and a town hall.

Key facts

• Scheduling is controlled by Set-CsTeamsEventsPolicy -AllowWebinars Enabled|Disabled (default Enabled). Admin center path: Meetings > Events policies.
• Who can attend is -EventAccessType with Everyone (default, public events) or EveryoneInCompanyExcludingGuests (in-org only).
• Public events allow anonymous registration and joining through the registration link, and organisers can let registrants bypass the lobby. In-org events include guests, but there's no anonymous registration.
• Every registrant gets a unique join link. Dial-in isn't available for webinar attendees.
• Up to 1,000 attendees are fully interactive. If the organiser turns on "Optimize for large audience", or the event goes past 1,000, it switches to the town hall policy settings and behaves like a town hall.
• Organisers can set registration open and close times and a capacity limit; the events policy also governs registration form question types and whether organisers can edit the email templates.
• Breakout rooms, PowerPoint Live, Whiteboard and the lobby all work in webinars; up to 10 co-organisers and up to 100 presenters.
• Transcription for webinars is -TranscriptionForWebinar on the events policy (enabled by default). Event recordings expire after 30 days by default, extendable to 90, and can be published as video on demand.
• The green room lets organisers and presenters gather before the event and stay behind after attendees are removed.
• Watermarks, preventing copy/forward of chat and captions, custom backgrounds, meeting themes and live translated captions remain Teams Premium features for webinars per the feature comparison.
• As of 1 April 2026 some features previously exclusive to Teams Premium are included in Teams Enterprise. Historically registration waitlists and manual approval were Premium-only — check the current feature comparison before promising them on a Teams Enterprise tenant.

When to use / skip

Use a webinar when you need people to sign up — customer briefings, partner sessions, recruitment events, external training. Registration gives the organiser a list of who's coming, branded emails and an attendance report worth something to marketing.

Skip it for internal sessions where everyone's already in the directory. A normal meeting with the invite sent to a distribution list does the same job with less setup. Skip it too when the audience is big and passive; that's a town hall. If the client's marketing team already runs Cvent, ON24 or similar with CRM integration, Teams webinars probably won't replace it — position them for the lighter, more frequent events.

Configuration decisions

• Who can create webinars — everyone, or a defined events team via a custom events policy.
• Whether webinars can be public or in-org only. Plenty of regulated clients start in-org and open up later.
• Whether organisers may edit email templates and which registration question types are allowed.
• Whether attendees from public events can bypass the lobby, or wait to be admitted.
• Recording and VOD — whether webinar recordings are published, and for how long they're kept.
• Whether the client needs Premium for waitlists, approval workflows, branding or watermarking, given what moved into Enterprise in April 2026.

Gotchas

• The 1,000 interactive limit is hard. Exceed it and the event becomes a town hall experience; attendees who expected to speak can't.
• In-org webinars still let guests in. If "internal only" really means employees, EveryoneInCompanyExcludingGuests is the setting.
• No dial-in for attendees. People who need to join by phone should get a normal meeting instead.
• Public webinars accept anonymous registrants. Expect junk registrations on anything advertised publicly, and set a capacity cap.
• Forwarded join links are personal. One attendee forwarding theirs to a colleague confuses the attendance report.
• Event recordings default to 30-day expiry, not the 120 days people are used to from meetings.

Consultant notes

• Build a short decision table for the client: meeting vs webinar vs town hall, driven by audience size, interaction and whether registration is needed. It saves endless support tickets.
• Give marketing a dry-run tenant account to test the full registrant journey, including the emails, before the first customer-facing event.
• Map the events policy to an events team group and assign via group policy assignment so it survives staff changes.
• Ask the client what reporting they need afterwards; the attendance report and registration export are often the real reason they wanted webinars.
• Recheck Premium versus Enterprise boundaries every few months — Microsoft has moved event features between tiers more than once.

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Worth revisiting when the webinar feature comparison next changes, especially around waitlist and manual approval licensing