Guidance for delivering virtual events

This guidance was created to assist event organizers, technical producers, IT professionals, and content creators deliver virtual events. We regularly update it with best practices, integrating new product features and guidelines to ensure your success.

Full playbook

The full playbook is organized by event delivery phase and role, with additional resources for each role. It is now supported in multiple languages!

Browse the playbook

Custom production playbook

Review our custom production playbook for seasoned event producers to leverage a more advanced technical design to deliver events.

Browse the playbook

Join our community

Producing events is a new skill for many people. Join others who are also learning in our Virtual Event community. Ask questions, meet experts, and expand your talents in this important area.

Join now

Compelling virtual events are easier than ever

Using Microsoft Teams, Live Events and the full capabilities of Microsoft 365 you can deliver small, medium or large scale virtual events to connect with employees and customers.  Communication is critical and easily leveraging these digital tools can help you invest in the important relationships that make your business thrive.

Live broadcast – from home

Microsoft is committed to ensuring that you can reach the people that are important to your business from any location.

  • Use Microsoft Teams to have interactive, two-way discussions up to 300* people
  • Use live events to broadcast to large scale audiences and support moderated Q&A
  • Use Office apps, SharePoint, and other Microsoft tools to deliver beautiful, interactive content

Professional broadcast capabilities are achievable with additional features for video stream ingestion and streaming.

*Learn more about live event limits

Tell your story with our tools

Virtual events aren’t about the technology. They are about what you want to communicate. As you design your event, prioritize your storytelling skills and use additional methods to drive engagement with your audience. Let your event fuel connectivity in three (3) key ways:

  • Inform & engage with news, announcements, and employee/customer engagement
  • Capture & share knowledge across your team, organization, or industry
  • Enrich collaboration by providing more authentic and effective communication and extending your reach to web and mobile devices

View the story of how the Microsoft Events team, alongside Microsoft Teams Engineering, used these principles to transform our annual developer conference into a virtual event.

Building Build: Microsoft’s developer conference goes digital

Use our Virtual Event Playbook

Get up to speed quickly with our Virtual Event Playbook that captures our best practices for using Microsoft technology to engage with your customer and employees. It includes:

  • Organizer checklist
  • Technical Producer readiness guide
  • What IT needs to know
  • Presenter and Moderator guidance
  • Ideas for building communities to continue engagement
  • Pitfalls to avoid
View the playbook

Live Event Assistance Program

Need help with a large scale event? The Microsoft 365 Live Event Assistance Program (LEAP) can provide you with
guidance and assistance to deliver your best webinars and live events.

Learn more