Fabrikam Retail: Choosing Town Hall, Webinar, and Something Else Entirely
Fabrikam Retail runs three recurring events. A quarterly all-hands for 12,000 employees: 9,000 remote, 3,000 in stores sharing tablets on shift. A monthly 500-person regional sales webinar that requires registration, attendance reporting, reminders, and a follow-up email. And in six weeks, an external product launch for 30,000 customers in English, Spanish, and Portuguese with live moderated Q&A. Executives insist on no attendee cameras or microphones, no attendee recording, a moderated Q&A, and a green room where presenters can rehearse off-camera. The events team has three producers, all licensed with Microsoft 365 E3. Security requires recordings retained for seven years and searchable. The launch date is fixed and journalists are on the external guest list.
1. Select the meeting type for each of the three events and explain where each choice is at risk.
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Event 1 - 12,000-employee all-hands: Teams town hall. One-to-many with no attendee camera, mic, or chat is exactly the town hall model; attendees get moderated Q&A only. Risk: confirm the current attendee ceiling for your licensing before committing - large-scale limits have moved and a 12,000 invite on a 10,000 ceiling fails at the worst possible moment. Mitigation: confirm in the service description, or run two sessions and publish the recording to SharePoint/Viva Engage for shift workers on shared store tablets, who will miss a live-only event anyway. Do not design a store tablet workflow that requires 3,000 individual sign-ins at shift change.
Event 2 - 500-person sales webinar: Teams webinar. Registration, attendance reporting, reminders, and post-event email are webinar capabilities; a town hall has no registration model. Risk: none technical - the risk is assuming reporting is automatic. Registration reports and attendance data live in the webinar's reporting surfaces and must be exported before retention or license changes remove access.
Event 3 - 30,000 external launch: neither. Both town hall and webinar top out well below 30,000. This must be a produced broadcast: a Teams town hall or production switcher as the source, simulcast through a third-party streaming platform for the external audience. Risk: the six-week lead time. A 30,000-seat external broadcast with three languages and press attendance is a production project, not a Teams meeting setting. Do not design on Teams live events - they have been retired; any design that references them is out of date.
2. Configure the 12,000-person all-hands. Which capabilities and licenses do you actually need, and who gets them?
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Configure on the organizer, not the audience. Meeting and town hall options are governed by the organizer's policy, so a small number of licenses can control a very large event.
Settings:
- Presenter group limited to named presenters; attendees cannot use camera, mic, or share.
- Q&A enabled with moderation on and 'publish' moderation so unfiltered questions never reach the screen.
- Green room enabled so presenters rehearse off-camera, and 'manage what attendees see' so the producer controls what is broadcast.
- Attendee chat disabled; Q&A is the only channel.
- Recording on, live captions on, anonymous join off.
Licensing judgment: several of the producer-grade controls (manage what attendees see, green room behavior, watermarking) have Teams Premium dependencies that change over time. Verify each control against the current licensing matrix rather than trusting memory, then license only the 3 producers and the presenters - buying Premium for 12,000 attendees to get a producer control is a budget error that gets noticed.
Rehearsal: run a full dry run with 50 people including one presenter joining from a mobile hotspot and one from a phone dial-in, because that is what breaks on the day.
3. Security wants seven years of searchable recordings. Where do recordings and Q&A content actually live, and what breaks first?
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Trace the artifact, then place the retention control.
- A town hall or meeting recording lands in the organizer's OneDrive or, for channel meetings, the team's SharePoint site. It is a file, so its lifecycle is governed by SharePoint/OneDrive retention policies and labels - not by a Teams chat or channel retention policy. Configure a 7-year retention label or policy on the destination location.
- Transcripts are stored alongside the recording and are separately governed; if the requirement is 'searchable', confirm transcripts are generated (they are not always on by default) and that retention covers them.
- Q&A and chat content is held in the meeting's chat/reporting surfaces with different retention behavior than the recording. If legal means 'everything said in the Q&A', capture that requirement explicitly.
- eDiscovery searches these locations, so the practical test is: search for a phrase spoken in a Q&A answer and confirm it returns.
What breaks first: presentation content shared in a town hall may not be captured the way you expect, and any production element (third-party stream, NDI output, external broadcast) is entirely outside your retention boundary. For the 30,000-person external launch, agree in writing what is retained and where - the press stream is the highest-risk gap, not the all-hands recording.