Operating a Show

Created by Faye for Freshworks, Modified on Fri, 30 Jan at 11:17 AM by Faye for Freshworks

In this article:

Starting the Meeting
Music as Participants Join
Joining the Meeting
Manage Attendees
Security Features
- Audio and Video Killswitch
- Locking and Unlocking the Meeting
Recording the Meeting
Sharing Content
Spotlight
- Without Spotlight
- With Spotlight
Screenshare PowerPoint Live
Q&A

Starting the Meeting

When it's close to the meeting's start time, you'll navigate to Teams, click on the meeting, and click Join. Attendees that join prior to the meeting's start will be filtered to the Lobby. If the Green Room is set up, you can set it to where Presenters and Co-Organizers can bypass the Lobby and go to the Green Room.

Music as Participants Join

How many virtual calls have you joined recently where you heard "We're going to give it 2 more minutes for everyone to join" followed by a funeral-grade awkward silence? Is that how you want your meeting to begin?

If not, Support Center can supply lively background music via screenshare. This will energize your participants for those first few minutes rather than encouraging to start multi-tasking. And if there's time for a little music at the close of the meeting, this can offer a polished bookend to the whole experience. We use Encore Music: Royalty Free Music from Storyblocks to source the same quality production tracks that Encore provides to customers for revenue-generating events, whether virtual or in-person.

Screensharing music in Teams is only possible when sharing a screen, so to have Support Center play the opening music we must also be sharing something visual. We normally ask to have the first slide of the presentation sent to us ahead of the meeting so we can share that with music playing in the background. Then, when the first presenter is ready to begin, they can simply start sharing their screen to end Support Center's share and music.

A little verbal introduction from the organizer gives the technician a few seconds for a slick fade-out of Support Center's music to transition into the event.

Joining the Meeting

External Attendees

Anyone invited outside of your organization is considered an external attendee. When they join the meeting, they will wait in the lobby until the meeting begins.

External attendees outside of your organization can only be invited as attendees. They cannot be set as Co-Organizers or Presenters.

Co-Organizers and Presenters

When Co-Organizers and Presenters join, they'll bypass the lobby and be sent to the Green Room to prepare for the meeting.

Attendees

When attendees join the meeting, they'll be moved to the lobby. If your settings allow it, they'll be able to communicate with others in the lobby, but this can be disabled by changing microphone and video permissions.

Green Room Presentation Preparation

The Green Room is where the Organizer, Co-Organizer, and Presenters will prepare for the upcoming meeting. You'll be able to safely communicate here without anyone in the lobby overhearing you. There are several checks you should run through prior to the meeting's start:

Equipment Check - Double check all of your audio and video equipment. Can people hear you? Is your lighting adequate? Check webcam placement and how you fit in the frame. For audio, make sure that you are wearing headphones if you're presenting. This eliminates the possibility of feedback when you're speaking.
Slide Check - Check that all your content is complete and ready for presentation. Make sure that all the slides are in order.
Presenter roles - Make sure that everyone is aware of and comfortable in their assigned role. Is the presenter presenting the slides, or will the Co-Organizer be helping? If anyone else is accessing the file to present for you, make sure that they have permission to open the file. Who's moving to the next slide? If someone other than the presenter is running the slides, make sure they know when to move to the next slide.

Manage Attendees

Assigning Roles

Roles should be assigned prior to the start of the meeting. To assign roles prior to the meeting:

Navigate to the meeting in the Teams calendar and select Options > More Options
Select Roles
From here, you can Choose Co-Organizers
- You can also adjust who can present from here

Promoting and Demoting

If, for some reason, you need to make any adjustments to user roles, you can do so.

To Promote an attendee:

Navigate to the meeting in the calendar
Select Options > More Options
From the dropdown menu under Choose Co-Organizers, search for participants and add them as a co-organizer.

To Demote:

Select People
Hover the mouse over the person you want to make adjustments to, and click more options.
Select Make a presenter or Make an attendee.

Security Features

Has someone gone rogue with their camera on? Are they sharing something that everyone would be better off not seeing? Do you need to lock things down? No worries, Teams has built-in security features that'll shut their cam off and mute their microphone.

Audio and Video Killswitch

To disable the meeting's audio and video:

During the meeting:

To turn off a specific attendee's audio and video:

Pull up the list of participants
Right click on the user's name
Click disable video/audio

To turn off everyone's audio and video:

Select More Actions, then Settings, then Meeting Options.
Select Audio and Video
Turn off the "Allow mic for attendees" or "Allow camera for attendees" option
Select Save.

Locking and Unlocking the Meeting

Has your invitation link gotten out and unauthorized people are joining the session? If so, you may want to lock the meeting. It's quite easy to do so:

In the meeting, select Participants, ... , then lock the meeting.

To unlock the meeting:

Follow the same steps as above, but choose unlock the meeting.

When a meeting is locked, nobody else can join it. However, those that were initially invited will still be able to access the chat, recording, etc. once the meeting concludes.

Recording the Meeting

One of the most important things you need to remember is to record the meeting.

Once again, we must remind you to make sure that record meeting automatically is turned off. Leaving this option on will mess with permission rights and attendees may not be able to access the recording.

Once the meeting has started, just make sure to hit record.

Sharing Content

Sharing your PowerPoint content inside of Teams is quite easy, and you won't even need to run a separate instance of PowerPoint outside of Teams. To share content:

Once the meeting begins, click the Share button.
You'll see a number of options, including sharing the full screen or sharing a specific window. Below that, you'll see a section for PowerPoint Live.
In this section, you'll see recently opened files. If your document is in there, click it, and it'll begin sharing.
If your document is not inside that section, continue scrolling down past the Excel (if it's there) section and you'll see two options, browse OneDrive, and Browse My Computer. Click and find your document to begin sharing.

Spotlight

It's enjoyable seeing the faces of many colleagues in a large virtual meeting, but where's the person who's speaking now? Despite the blue outline Teams adds to the current active speaker, sometimes a presenter can get lost in the sea of faces.

Without Spotlight

Where's Waldo? Hint: he's presenting from the top middle inside a tiny blue rectangle.

No one puts Jim Hughes in a corner! He's the main presenter of this meeting.

With Spotlight

A Support Center operator can use the Spotlight feature to manually ensure whoever the audience should focus on now is prominently featured, even if they're silently listening to a question from the audience before responding. The experience for attendees mimics watching an in-person presenter on stage with the Teams Spotlight directing viewers' attention just like an elevated and professionally lit stage area. Spotlighting adds the polish that a large virtual event deserves.

To Spotlight someone's video, simply right click on their video and select Spotlight.

Now we can see the presenter wasn't Waldo after all! Tom Drozd is looking sharp with his full 16:9 video uncropped and featured at the head of the gallery as he presents Scenic Solutions.

Even without screenshare, Spotlight helps the audience focus on the important message Rick Barnes is delivering. And if you have a panel or group presentation, up to 7 people can share the Spotlight simultaneously.

Screenshare PowerPoint Live

Can you recall a recent meeting you attended where one person screenshared the slides for several presenters and you heard "Next slide please, Fred. Oh no, that's too far!"?

If you're sharing a PowerPoint slideshow (and nothing else), you can empower your presenters advance their own slides. They'll all be able to see upcoming slides (similar to Presenter View, but not exactly the same) so they know when their segment is up next. Only Presenters and Co-Organizers will see a "Take Control" button at the top of their Teams window to instantly take control of the presentation when it's their turn to present. This way you can still combine everyone's slides into a single PowerPoint deck for a seamless presentation.

This is accomplished in the Screenshare menu by choosing PowerPoint Live rather than sharing a monitor or a window.

Presenter View-style layout

If your presenters want to get comfortable with this new way of screensharing, what better place to practice than in the Green Room before the meeting!

Sharing PowerPoint Live also comes with great benefits for your attendees:

Navigate back or forward to see the slides at your own pace! (optional)
Clickable links on slides!

Navigate Back or Forward

If you allow, participants can skip back to a slide they missed or look ahead in the presentation if they need to leave early. They'll also be able to sync back to the currently shared slide to avoid getting lost. If you want to keep your audience focused on the current slide at all times, you can toggle the "Private View" button.

Clickable Links

If your PowerPoint includes links to resources for your attendees, sharing in this way makes the links clickable live. That's right! Rather than just watching the slideshow and sending out the presentation with links afterward, your participants can engage with your content as you're delivering it. By visiting the resources linked in your slides while you're presenting the slides, you can increase engagement with the content and reduce the distracting urge to multi-task. Q&A following the presentation can be richer because simple questions may have already been answered when participants viewed a linked resource.

Sharing PowerPoint Live with clickable links, participant back/advance, and Presenter View-style for all presenters is only possible with PowerPoint files. Switching to any content outside of PowerPoint like web pages, PDFs, etc. will not appear to your audience. This includes Polling+ (Slido), even if you're using the Slido PowerPoint integration that adds poll questions into your slides. To switch seamlessly between PowerPoint and other applications will require you to share your screen in the traditional way without these features.

Q&A

A Q&A session will allow attendees to interact with presenters. As a quick reminder, to enable QA, you'll need to do this prior to the meeting starting:

At the top of the meeting window, navigate to more actions
Select meeting options
Make sure Q&A is toggled on

Once Q&A is enabled, co-organizers can toggle Q&A settings, including moderation, highlighting specific questions, and deleting posts.

Depending on the type of Q&A session you have, you may want to moderate incoming questions. By moderating questions, you'll be able to filter out low quality questions. The moderator(s) (organizers and/or co-organizers) will need to review each question submitted. You should see three headings inside the Q&A thread in your meeting:

In Review - These are questions that have been submitted but have not yet been reviewed. All questions, by default, will land here, and your moderator will either need to approve or dismiss the question.
Published - These are questions that have been approved and will be visible to all attendees.
Dismissed - These are questions that, for whatever reason, were rejected by the moderator(s) and will not be seen by attendees.