You can now host a 20,000-person Microsoft Teams meeting

Microsoft is adding new features to Teams through an Advanced Communications plan which allows users of the company's video conferencing software to deliver online meetings and events at a much broader scale.

As part of the new plan, Teams meetings can be scaled up to 20,000 participants to allow organizations to reach larger audiences and stay connected with their employees, customers and partners. While building this new capability, Microsoft focused on delivering the same meeting experience customers are familiar with by ensuring that even as the meeting scales it is still easy for participants to manage and listen to the speakers.

While Teams can now support large-scale meetings with up to 20,000 participants, the software giant has limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants with a seamless shift to a 'view only' mode after the limit has been met.

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Advanced Communications plan

The new Advanced Communications plan for Microsoft Teams will also offer enhanced admin control and organizations will now be able to insert more structure in to their meetings by adding their company's branding to meetings for a more professional look and feel.

The software giant's branded meeting lobby for Teams will launch in the coming months and this branding will also be extended to the core meeting experience at a later date. Organizations will also be able to use the new plan to set up a compliance recording policy or bring in collaboration to their customer engagement workflows.

Microsoft Teams' Advanced Communications plan can be added to any Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription beginning this week. Organizations can test out these new features for themselves by getting a 60-day free trial via the Teams admin Center now or by going to the Microsoft Teams website beginning in mid-August.

With more people working from home than ever before, Microsoft has continued to add new features to Teams in order for its video conferencing software to better compete with rivals Zoom and Google Meet.