I have been doing a few webinars and experimenting with different platforms for registrations, but have found that Microsoft 365 has all the tools I need to seamlessly automate the registration process for attendees and myself.
Rather than keep this knowledge to myself, I thought I'd share it with you all here.
Step 1: Use Teams to Create Live Event webinar
Teams Live Events are a great way to reach a wide audience. They enable you to broadcast a variety of content in a webinar style format live. Okay, actually there's a 20-30 second delay, but who's counting?
Create live event
From your Microsoft Teams app, click the Calendar on the far left.
Once in your calendar, click the down arrow next to New meeting, and select 'Live event'.
This will open a new window where you can populate all the Live event details. Make sure to select the correct Date, give it a title that you want Attendees to see (this does not update later for attendees if you change it, so get it right now), and provide a description for yourself or other presenters (such as agenda).
Click Next.
Live event permissions
Choose who can view the live event. This is the audience. If you cannot select 'Public', you need to talk to your admin about setting up a Public Live Event Policy.
How will you produce your live event?
It works really well using Teams to produce your live event - no fancy studio or recording equipment required.
Tick the boxes to configure your settings.
Note that audience members cannot speak or present or interact with each other during a live event, so I like to turn on Q&A, as this gives them the opportunity to type questions and interact with the presenter. I also tick the Recording available to attendees as this enables people to watch after the fact if they couldn't join live. You can always turn this off a week or two after the event, and then the link will no longer give them access to the recording. Captions are great for accessibility, so think about your audience.
Click Schedule.
Get attendee link
To share your event with your audience, you'll need to send them the attendee link.
Simply open the Live Event and click the 'Get attendee link' link to copy the attendee link. Save this somewhere safe, we'll need it later.
Step 2: Use Microsoft Forms to Create Registration Form
There are many ways to create a Form in Microsoft 365, it integrates so well with Office 365 apps such as Teams and Excel. If you're the only one who needs to see registration and attendee information, then you can use any method to create the form, but chances are you might enlist some help at some stage of the process and want to share this form with others. In that case, my favourite way to create a Form is to start in Microsoft Teams and use Forms for Excel.
Create registration form
Choose the Team where you want the form responses to live. This team should relate to the webinar or topic, and everyone in this team will have Edit access to the registration form.
Note: This is NOT the team of people you will invite to the webinar, they only need View access.
Choose the Channel within the Team where you want the Excel file of responses to be stored. Again, this will probably relate to the webinar topic.
Click the Files tab, and select New > Forms for Excel.
This should open a new browser with Microsoft Forms.
Format the theme, title, details and questions of the form as you see fit for your webinar. You can ask as many or as few questions as you like.
For this example I recommend you create at least two questions as we will use these in the flow later:
Add New > Text > Name
Add New > Text > Email
Make both of these questions required.
Get form ID
In order to use this form in Power Automate, we need the form ID. You can grab this from the URL of the form editing screen.
Look for the part of the URL that says
#FormId=
and copy all the letters and numbers after the equal sign. Save this for reference later.
Step 3: Use Outlook to Create Calendar Reminder
I find it challenging to manage all the webinars I sign up for, especially now that many of them are being offered internationally and I need to calculate time zone differences. If you don't want people to miss your webinar, it's a good idea to give them a calendar invite with the correct time and joining information already populated for them.
This does add a bit more complexity to the registration setup, but in my opinion it's well worth the time.
Create Calendar Appointment in Outlook
Create a calendar appointment in your own Outlook calendar with all the information you want to share with attendees. Make sure you get the date and time right (include time zone). This is probably a good place to include the attendee link that we saved in Step 1.
Save .ics file
Save the calendar appointment as a .ics file. You can do this from the File tab in the ribbon when you have the calendar appointment open: Click File > Save As >
Save this file into SharePoint (I put it in the same Team as the registration form). Choose iCalendar Format for the Save As Type.
(Optional) Get Direct Download Link
In order to make it easy for attendees to open the calendar invite, you should share a link that will automatically start download of the calendar invite. To do this, go to the SharePoint location where you saved the file.
Share this file and grant access so that 'Anyone with the link can view'.
Now click the three dots next to the file, and select 'Details'. This will open a pane on the right hand side. Scroll down to find the 'Path' section and click the icon to copy the filepath:
You will end up with a link that looks something like this (note this is a sample link I have edited so won't work):
https://companyname.sharepoint.com/sites/Webinars/Documents/Calendar%20Links/Power%20BI%20webinar%20-%20Survey%20Says.ics
To ensure that it downloads automatically, just add
?download=1
to the end of the link. It should now look something like this:
https://companyname.sharepoint.com/sites/Webinars/Documents/Calendar%20Links/Power%20BI%20webinar%20-%20Survey%20Says.ics?download=1
You can test it out in a web browser, but save this link somewhere handy so you can use it in your flow.
Step 4: Use Power Automate to Create Flow to send confirmation emails
Open up Power Automate in your Office 365 (or type flow.microsoft.com into the URL of your favourite web browser).
When you're done, your flow might look something like this:
I have designed this flow with ease of reuse in mind, so I have created a few variables to enable me to quickly update the flow for my next webinar. Let's start at the beginning though and work through each step:
Trigger: When a new response is submitted
From Power Automate home screen, click Create and search the templates for 'Forms'.The 'Send an email from shared mailbox on Microsoft Form submission' is pretty close to what we're trying to do, so choose that template:
Now that you're in the form editing screen, we're going to make a few changes:
- Rename the flow in the top left. I called mine 'Webinar Confirmation Emails' but you may want to be more specific to which webinar.
- Fill in the Form Id in both the first and second steps. This is the long code we copied from the URL in step 2.
- Delete the 'Send an email from a shared mailbox' step. You can use it if you'd like, but I prefer the personal touch of sending the email from me.
Initialize and set variables
Sometimes variables are crucial in the success of running a flow, but in this case I have just added them to make it easier to update the flow for my next webinar. It also makes it easier to show someone else how to maintain the flow, without needing to teach them everything about Power Automate.
In my flow I have created three simple variables, all of them Type = String.
- Webinar Name
- Webinar Date (in my local time zone)
- Attendee Time Zone
Note my Attendee Time Zone has a comment - click the three dots at the top of this step and 'Add comment'. This is another way to make it easier to update later; if you're the one updating you don't have to recall what you did, if someone else is helping to update you don't have to teach them the entire flow.
Power Automate (and most things in Microsoft 365) work with UTC time, so we need to convert the time of the webinar so that my confirmation emails go out when I want them to.
Note I have used the dynamic content of my variable, so when I am ready to copy this flow to the next webinar I only need to change the Webinar Date variable and everything will update.
Send Confirmation Email with .ics attachment
Now we need to grab that .ics iCalendar appointment we saved to SharePoint in step 3. There are two ways to share this file, as a link or as an attachment. To share it as an attachment, you need to add a step "Get file content using path".
Browse to the correct Team site and file location in the action.
Then add a step for "Send an email (V2)" for Office 365. Click the three dots and rename this to 'Send confirmation email'. Expand the 'Advanced options' and put the dynamic content of the File Content from the "Get file content using path" step. Note I rename my steps as I go so that they are more meaningful to me.
The trick here is to give the attachment a proper name, including file type. Since it's a .ics file, we need to add .ics to the end of the Attachments name:
Use the dynamic content to fill in the other information in the email. This is where those required Registration Form questions will come into play - it's great to add a personal touch to the confirmation email and address each attendee by name.
Add links to confirmation email
To add links to the email, just use the action link icon to create the link. If you look closely in my screenshots above, you will see I used the 'compose' action as a step to hold information and called it 'Instructions for Email Links'. I have just discovered the compose box and it's fantastic. You can put anything in here, and here I'm just using it as a holding block for comments and helpful information. In this example, you can copy the attendee link and iCalendar download link for reference:
Note that this compose box serves no purpose in the flow. You still need to paste these links into the send email action, but it helps store information you plan to use multiple times throughout the flow (dynamic content isn't available in email links yet).
Configure run after to send failure notification email to webinar owner
Since Microsoft Forms free doesn't offer any email validation, we need to build that into our flow. If someone misspells their email or provides a fake email address, the flow will fail when it attempts the 'Send Confirmation Email' step. To make it easier for the webinar owner (they don't want to check the flow details each time that happens), we'll configure run after and send them a custom email.
Add a new step for "Send an email (V2)" for Office 365. Click the three dots and rename this to 'Send invalid email to Webinar Owner'.
Click the three dots on 'Send invalid email to Webinar Owner' and choose 'Configure run after'. Tick 'has failed' and untick all other boxes, then click Done:
This will ensure that your webinar owner only gets notified if the confirmation email failed, if it succeeds, then the flow will skip this step and carry on as normal.
To carry on with the rest of the flow, the subsequent step should have a 'configure run after' that allows it to run when the failure notification is skipped:
Add subsequent actions
Add any other actions you wish for your flow. In my example, I have one reminder email going out before the webinar. I have used the 'Delay until' action to get this working and 'Subtract from time' to specify how far before the start of the webinar to send this reminder. Note: You must use UTC time for this step.
Note that Power Automate integrates with hundreds of connectors, not just Microsoft products. For example, you could link it to your Mailchimp account to help with marketing and follow up after the webinar:
Once you're happy with your flow, save it.
Test your flow by filling in the registration form.
Step 5: Share your Registration Form Link
Now you're ready to share live. All you need to do to take registrations is share that Forms link with potential attendees. I'll leave it up to you to decide how best to promote this (email, website, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).
