New Microsoft Graph APIs for managing Microsoft Teams webinars

Sheri Mehmood

Annie Wang

Microsoft Teams supports multiple types of scheduled real-time voice and video experiences, such as meetings, webinars, and live events. Webinars and live events, specifically, are used to reach a large audience of 1,000+ users and provide additional control for the meeting organizer over the conversation and participants.

Earlier this year, we shared details on advanced webinars in Teams Premium. Today, we’re announcing the preview (beta) of new Microsoft Graph APIs that allow you to get and monitor webinar data. Webinars are not simply bigger meetings. They are uniquely important moments for an organization that bring together both employees and customers. For many webinars, success requires proactive, customized marketing and engagement of potential attendees that maximizes reach and participation. These new APIs allow line-of-business applications or multi-tenant ISV solutions to serve this need.

About the new APIs for Teams webinars

Applications can programmatically access information on webinars such as its time, description, organizers, registration questions and requirements, and then market that to attendees. Other potential uses for this data include syncing webinar and attendee information with learning management systems (LMS) and customer data platform (CDP).

The Virtual Event Playbook provides guidance for driving effective events and webinars. We’ve included some of the end-user personas used by Microsoft Teams below. Understanding these definitions can help you make the best use of these new Microsoft Graph APIs:

1. Organizers are employees who manage the webinar. They are the authority on when, where, and who is participating. They configure webinar attributes such as title and theme and set the registration rules and questions.
2. Presenters are employees or external participants who lead the session.
3. Attendees who are either employees or external users who join the session. They register for webinars and answer registration questions.

Using Microsoft Graph APIs, developers can build custom user experiences and automation for:

1. Before the event: Obtaining organizer-configured attributes like time, location, description, presenters, theming, and registration questions.
   1. A common automation use case for these Microsoft Graph APIs is to harvest webinar information and send this information through email and other marketing channels to registered attendees and potential attendees.
2. After the event: Using registration answers and an attendance report to communicate to attendees with customized post-event marketing campaigns.

This initial release exposes APIs for getting content from Microsoft Teams. A future release will include create, update, and register APIs, allowing applications using Microsoft Graph to customize the attendee registration experience and pre/post event marketing. Attendees will be able to browse Microsoft Teams webinars, register, and answer registration questions through custom websites or apps that integrate these APIs.

The Microsoft Graph API structure for webinars is consistent with the information architecture in the Microsoft Teams user experience. This ensures that end-users can use both the native Teams user interface and custom applications using Microsoft Graph seamlessly.

Figure 1 – A Teams built-in experience for creating a webinar using the new Microsoft Graph APIs to pull the data from Teams. A future release will provide create and update APIs so these experiences can be managed by custom applications using Microsoft Graph.

Getting started with these new Microsoft Graph APIs

The core of these new APIs are the following new Microsoft Graph API resources:

1. Virtual Event Webinar
2. Virtual Event Registrant
3. Virtual Event Registration
4. Virtual Event Question (and answer)

There are APIs for subscribing to change notifications for the following resources. These change notifications are implemented as webhooks that call into your service API.

• Event Create
• Event Update or Soft Delete
• Session Create, Update, and Soft Delete
• Registrant Register or Cancel

Again, because the Microsoft Graph API and Teams user experiences are consistent, these change notifications allow your custom applications to remain in sync with Teams, no matter where end-users are interfacing with webinars.

You can find more information to get started with these APIs in our documentation and provide feedback at https://aka.ms/graphfeedback. Follow us on Twitter @Microsoft365Dev to stay up to date on Microsoft 365 Platform announcements.

Happy coding!

Sheri Mehmood Senior Product Manager

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Annie Wang Program Manager

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