Technology Musings

Microsoft Teams is a great solution for chats, calls, and meetings - but it's not so great for larger meetings. For that, there's Microsoft Teams live events, which is the next evolution of Skype Meeting Broadcast. Why is Live Events better for larger meetings? Well, Teams is fundamentally a collaboration tool, and Teams meetings are many-to-many meetings. Whilst Teams has a maximum of 250 attendees, such a large Teams meeting would be pretty hard to manage, to say the least. Live Events is designed to work for one-to-many meetings (up to 10,000 attendees), and is much better suited to that type of event: all attendees are muted for example, and just the presenter's video is shown. There are also audience feedback mechanisms much more suited to large-scale events. As this is a <cough> live area of interest right now, here's a quick run-down which might be useful if you're looking at trying it out. Understanding Event Types Although this doesn't ...

For many years when I worked as an IT Manager in 'corporate IT', Macs were a big No No for me. "It's not our standard!" we would say. "We can't manage them!" we would assert. But a few years ago, when I needed to buy a new computer for myself, I went out and bought a Mac. I guess from a professional point of view, I felt I really should find out what they're like. And from a personal point of view, I use an iPad and an iPhone, and I knew that the Mac would integrate well into the ecosystem. I thought I'd find it hard getting used to the Mac - but d'you know what? I didn't. Sure, some of the keyboard shortcuts took me a while to find or get used to (but to be fair, most PC laptop keyboards have things like their cursor keys and other special keys in non-standard locations). But by-and-large, things Just Worked. On a couple of occasions - like when my work laptop died suddenly with no warning, and it wasn't until the follo...