Microsoft Teams Integration with Dynamics 365

From Concept to Execution to Finance

Have you considered that Teams can extend beyond meetings, or webinars to large scale virtual conferencing complete with sponsorships, virtual booths, multiple concurrent sessions, conference-wide or focused broadcasting, as well as multiple moderators and contributors? Microsoft Teams does more than simple chat, collaboration, video conferencing.

Microsoft Teams has seen its daily active user count rise from 32 million in March to over 75 million by the end of April 2020. As an app available in the broader Microsoft 365 productivity bundle, Teams is available to all Microsoft 365 customers, it simply needs to be activated to start using it. Lately, Microsoft has been promoting big-name organizations that have been using Teams, which includes the NFL who used Teams to manage the Draft. In March, Microsoft reported that 91 of the 100 largest organizations, a staggering number, all use Teams in the workplace. That’s all to say that here at Altai we are big fans of Teams and use the app daily ourselves.

One of the ways we love Teams is its functionality and ability to integrate. Our own team, spearheaded by partner, Mike Frye, has combined the powerful tools found in Teams, with Altai’s AMS built within Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. Together, we’ve created a powerhouse virtual event management tool for associations.

Since associations and its members are already collaborating daily with teams, the end result of our integration is a seamless experience for your organization’s membership. In addition, registering for events, purchasing booths, and providing sponsorships are conducted within your member portal before publishing your conference.

How it Works: High-Level Functionality

The Altai Event Management systems allow users to manage webinars and events using an easy to use template and cloning application.

Using the Event template builder you can click on an event or template and create a webinar or full-blown annual event and have it ready for registration in less than a minute.  Altai’s event management platform manages the following:

• Easily creating the Event in the CRM
• Publishing the event to the web portal
• Enabling membership to register for the event.
• Creating the Event in Teams as a secure member portal
• Inviting the users to both the Team and the Teams Meeting
• Building a presenter’s area for session discussions, content, handouts, and collaboration
• Transcribing and indexing the session meeting once it is finished.
• “Community” enables the content.
• Security, content can be open or closed to nonmembers or only available to specific committees.
• Support for simple webinars or events with sessions, booths, committees,

What Event Features are implemented/integrated with Teams?

• Automatically create an event site with member-specific security.
• Ability to manage many sessions.
• Ability to sell and manage vendor “booths”
• Ability to sell and manage sponsorships.
• Ability to enable broadcast communications to the sessions, booths, and members.
• Allow a member in securely and also block/remove them.
• Allow speakers and moderators to collaborate privately
• Allow registrants to see video content at a later date. (Coming Oct, but YouTube for now)
• Allow for the automatic transcription of the meeting.
• Ability to allow registrants to discuss and collaborate on content or session.

The Altai Microsoft solution has all the features required to put on an event.  Teams has a fantastic ability to allow those producing an event or a session to collaborate on the best ways to achieve this educational content and deliver it to the right members at the right time.

What are the advantages of using Microsoft Teams?

Today Microsoft Teams is the number one collaboration platform in the world.  It is free with Office 365, and it has all the functionality you need to bring your members closer to your events and programs.  Teams is perfect for learning and Teams is also very extendable.  You can configure a webinar or event with over 200 apps that allow your members to learn and collaborate better.  Here are a few of the features:

• Ability to invite members without paying a per-user license fee.
• A community can be built around the content.
• Extreme reliability and scalability. Today 75 million users log onto Teams daily.  Not only does Teams automatically scale, but it is also ultra-secure.
• The content is captured forever and is available to the membership as an additional benefit and an additional revenue stream
• Security, you can control each portion of the event, the presentation, and the availability of that meeting to members at a very granular level.
• A very easy and familiar interface.
• Very flexible to extend and automate. One can automate any aspect of an event from registration to one-click wallet pay to automatic surveys to task management with only a few clicks.