Microsoft Teams meetings will soon support 1,000 participants

Microsoft Teams users will soon be able to hold interactive meetings with up to 1,000 participants.

The update, which was first announced in August, is now scheduled to become available in December 2020. It will allow users to add up to 1,000 participants in a meeting, allowing greater online collaboration across enterprises as numerous countries, including the UK, head for another lockdown.

Users will also be able to hold Teams meetings for 1,000 participants while also enabling up to 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience.

According to Microsoft’s 365 Roadmap, the feature is currently "In Development" and will be ready by the end of the year.

Users will be able to access the feature using the Advanced Communications add-on which was launched on 1 August 2020. The license costs $12 (£9.28) per user a month and is available as a free trial for 60 days.

With a 20,000-participant capacity, the plan made it possible for large enterprises to host meetings for the entirety of their staff, allowing Microsoft to take advantage of the heightened demand for video conferencing.

Microsoft Teams general manager Nicole Herskowitz said that the tech giant put emphasis on users’ meeting experience when developing the capability, "making sure that even as the meeting scales it is still easy to manage and listen to the speakers”

"Therefore, we limited the size of interactive meetings to 1,000 participants, with a seamless shift to a 'view only' mode after the limit is met," she added.

Microsoft Teams has enjoyed an exceptional increase in popularity since the start of the pandemic, as many organisations moved to remote working environments due to lockdown restrictions.

On 28 October, Microsoft announced that the platform’s number of daily active users surpassed 115 million, a staggering increase of 95 million since the year prior.

Commenting on the announcement, corporate VP for Microsoft 365 Jared Spataro said that the growth "reflects the continued demand for Teams as the lifeline for remote and hybrid work and learning during the pandemic, helping people and organizations in every industry stay agile and resilient in this new era”.