Best practices for a large meeting in Microsoft Teams

Before a large meeting

• Present the meeting from a wired connection or network for better and more reliable audio and video.

• Create polls to gather information about attendees.

• In Meeting options, do the following:

1. To the right of Who can bypass the lobby?, select a minimum of People in my organization. 

2. To the right of Who can present?, select Specific people. Then, next to Choose presenters:, select Search for participants. Choose the people that you want as presenters in your meeting (from within your organization or federated organizations only).

   Note: After a meeting has started, presenters can promote other attendees to the presenter role.

3. To the right of Allow mic for attendees?, switch the toggle to No. If someone needs to interact during the meeting, either allow them to unmute when they raise their hand or change their role by hovering over their name and selecting More options . For more info, see Manage attendee audio and video permissions.

4. To the right of Allow camera for attendees?, switch the toggle to No. During appropriate times in the meeting, video can be permitted for an individual attendee or all attendees. For more info, see Manage attendee audio and video permissions. 

5. When you're done with these settings, select Save.

During a large meeting

• Use Spotlight a video to highlight a single presenter to make them stand out (Note that Spotlight can’t be used in Large Gallery or Together Mode).

• Meeting organizers and presenters can change participant settings for attendees, such as allowing them to unmute or promoting them as presenters.

• Remind and encourage attendees to raise their hands before speaking and to use live reactions.

• Create polls during the meeting to get feedback from attendees.

More things to know

• For the best experience attending large meetings, webinars, and live events, attendees should use the latest version of the Teams app on a desktop or mobile device. For more info, see Update Microsoft Teams.

• When a meeting reaches 1,000 attendees, the meeting organizer and presenters will see a banner indicating that new attendees will join as view-only.

• View-only attendees can’t join a meeting if view-only isn’t available and they aren’t allowed to bypass the lobby.

• Breakout rooms can’t be created in meetings that have more than 300 attendees, even if the number of attendees drops to fewer than 300 during the meeting. Also, creating breakout rooms in a meeting automatically limits the number of meeting attendees to 300.