This is an exciting time with the Teams Collaboration market that got triggered by Slack and has caused giants like Microsoft and Cisco to build and introduce their own versions of Team Collaboration Solutions. Each one is trying to address this market with supposedly unique experiences. While I’m a big fan of Cisco Webex Teams for its completeness of vision, my favorite happens to be Microsoft Teams. The reason is its rebel stance it has taken against the Traditional Office Applications by not adhering to their Architecture. Instead this team (Microsoft Team’s dev team) has gone ahead with open source ecosystem to the extent possible and use the Traditional .Net/Visual C++ copy paste to a minimum. The Efficiency benefits shows up with the relatively tiny installation file in the 70-80 MB range that can be installed by the user without admin rights… this is Preposterous for any Traditional Microsoft developer! I love this open attitude and for a 1-year old software Microsoft Teams is loaded with features and keeps coming up with new features every month. I would advice you to check their twitter feed @MicrosoftTeams if you don’t believe me… In comparison, both Traditional Microsoft oldies and other competition are just too slow to come up with updating their capabilities… Unlike a traditional admin, I’m a person who like rapid change and this fluidity of Microsoft Teams is something I love!
Getting back to the topic, Microsoft recently announced the new feature called Live Events as part of their Meetings Capabilities. While the regular Meetings is for Many-To-Many Real-Time Multi-Media Collaboration……
Live Events is specifically geared for ‘Near Real-time’, ‘Some-to-Many’ Video Collaboration.
Bidirectional capabilities are restricted to text and not voice or video. On the flip side the capacity of the audience is greatly increased beyond the 250-participant limit of regular Meetings. Further capability to bring in External Encoders to make the event rich with Studio like capabilities completely blast all other competition out of the water!
If this was a audio/video blog you should be hearing a loud bomb sound now
So great features, but how do they actually perform. The Regular Live Events setup and run is pretty simple and well documented, you can check here (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/what-are-teams-live-events)for more details to get started quickly
Further links here will guide you through on how to enable live events for all or selective users. Everything can be achieved over GUI and boring and hence I’m not going to blog about here…
Now, when the time came to enable External Encoder in my lab account, I had some interesting nerdish adventure and I believe this would be of interest to someone who has just started administering Microsoft Teams and has not faced PowerShell before. If you are an IT Pro who manages Skype for Business Online on a regular basis then this article may be boring and you may want to stop reading….
For the rest of us, join me on a trip to Teams ‘PowerShell’ Wonderland
Getting Started
Typically, I wouldn’t have gone into this as I typically try out Office365 stuff from my desktop which is fully setup. This I tried on my new laptop with zero Office365 activity and that meant starting from scratch… Compared to the rest of Microsoft Teams administration, this one was old school and hence this blog
The first thing you need to have is a ‘Windows’ OS, preferably Windows 10 Creators Update or later… if you are something older, then you may have some other adventure in addition to what I experienced😉… Do let me know in the comments.
Install Skype Online PowerShell Modules
This usually is supposed to be a boring activity…Just head over to https://download.microsoft.com/download/2/0/5/2050B39B-4DA5-48E0-B768-583533B42C3B/SkypeOnlinePowerShell.Exe
Download and install….

Beyond the need for admin rights what could go wrong??? Wrong…

….the old world has to catch you by the throat and install its Goodies …

So, head back to https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/VC_redist.x64.exe
Download and install …with admin access of course…Now again try to install the PowerShell Modules

After this you need to ‘Restart’! Yippee!
Power of the Shell be with You
Now after Reboot and open the most favorite adventure app called Windows PowerShell… I like the ISE as it lets me interactively check documentation on modules and create scripts… You could have the same adventure as this blog with the regular PowerShell as well…

Now we need to import the modules we ‘Installed’… Other shells don’t have such needs! Why! The explanation is a bit lengthy …but google it and you should get a good answer
We Import the modules using the following command
>Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
This sadly results in an error!

The reason is that by default the execution policy is set to Restricted and hence Mighty Powerful magic like Import-Module is not allowed… So, we need to change to Signed…And not just Signed but to ‘RemoteSigned’ as our execution is going to happen remotely in Office365 Servers…
>Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
You should be presented with a confirmation if you have enough strength to wield such mighty powers and if you want to wield it always

I usually do ‘A’ but you would be safer with ‘Y’
Now let’s do the Import
>Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
We now get something going and a confirmation appears again if all the new magic skills are something you can handle?

I’m a pro so I say ‘A’ …again if you want to be careful, then choose ‘R’
Now we are all loaded up…Time to do some magic…
Let’s prepare to do some magic
First authenticate ourselves… Lets get our credentials into a variable called $userCredential
>$userCredential = Get-Credential
cmdlet Get-Credential at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:

Awesome… Now create a session to build a bridge to the Ether World
>$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential
> Import-PSSession $sfbSession

If you see this…then it means that It is working!
ModuleType Version Name ExportedCommands
———- ——- —- —————-
Script 1.0 tmp_w5fa1s0p.qns {Clear-CsOnlineTelephoneNumberReservation, ConvertTo-JsonForPSWS, Copy-C…
Finally! let’s do the stuff we actually wanted to do
Check what is the Broadcast Policy set globally
>Get-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy -identity Global
Darn it asked for credentials again!

But something went wrong….
Creating a new session for implicit remoting of “Get-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy” command…
New-PSSession : [admin3a.online.lync.com] Connecting to remote server admin3a.online.lync.com failed with the following error
message : The WinRM client cannot process the request. The authentication mechanism requested by the client is not supported by the
server or unencrypted traffic is disabled in the service configuration. Verify the unencrypted traffic setting in the service
configuration or specify one of the authentication mechanisms supported by the server. To use Kerberos, specify the computer name
as the remote destination. Also verify that the client computer and the destination computer are joined to a domain. To use Basic,
specify the computer name as the remote destination, specify Basic authentication and provide user name and password. Possible
authentication mechanisms reported by server: For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
At C:\Users\<removed>\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp_w5fa1s0p.qns\tmp_w5fa1s0p.qns.psm1:136 char:17
+ & $script:NewPSSession `
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : OpenError: (System.Manageme….RemoteRunspace:RemoteRunspace) [New-PSSession], PSRemotingTransportExce
ption
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : AccessDenied,PSSessionOpenFailed
Exception calling “GetSteppablePipeline” with “1” argument(s): “No session has been associated with this implicit remoting module.”
At C:\Users\<removed>\AppData\Local\Temp\tmp_w5fa1s0p.qns\tmp_w5fa1s0p.qns.psm1:10423 char:13
+ $steppablePipeline = $scriptCmd.GetSteppablePipeline($myI …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : RuntimeException
Back to the Spell Book
A bit of googling later it turns out that Import-PSSession only imports the ingredients of our spell but the darn pentagram is stuck in the cloud! So, lets enter the cloud …
> Enter-PSSession $sfbSession
[admin3a.online.lync.com]: PS>
How do you know you are on the cloud…? You see the Command Prompt has changed! You may get a different server name…. but if you reached here…You are doing Good!
Now let’s check the global policy for TeamsMeetingBroadcast…
[admin3a.online.lync.com]: PS> Get-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy -identity Global
Description :
AllowBroadcastScheduling : True
AllowBroadcastTranscription : False
BroadcastAttendeeVisibilityMode : EveryoneInCompany
BroadcastRecordingMode : AlwaysEnabled
Key :[{urn:schema:Microsoft.Rtc.Management.Policy.Teams.2017}TeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy,Tenant{800fdedd-6533-43f5-9557-965b3eca76f6},Global]
ScopeClass : Global
Anchor : Microsoft.Rtc.Management.ScopeFramework.GlobalScopeAnchor
Identity : Global
TypedIdentity : Global
Element : <TeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy xmlns=”urn:schema:Microsoft.Rtc.Management.Policy.Teams.2017″
AllowBroadcastScheduling=”true” AllowBroadcastTranscription=”false”
BroadcastAttendeeVisibilityMode=”EveryoneInCompany” BroadcastRecordingMode=”AlwaysEnabled” />
We need to specifically focus on the status of AllowBroadcastScheduling to be True… For me it is true and if you have already fiddled on the GUI Policies, then this must be true…else Please go back to the GUI Admin Centre and enable Meeting scheduling to True in the Global Policy
Are we there yet?
If you’ve come this far then now we are ready to do the magic we came all this way for
[admin3a.online.lync.com]: PS> Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy -Identity <type full user name here> -PolicyName $null -Verbose
Whoosh!
VERBOSE: Performing the operation “Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy” on target “<the username will appear here>”.
VERBOSE: Audit disabled on Cmdlet level
We finally did it!
How do I check?
Head back to the streams portal and click on Create drop down…the user for whom you did the magic should be able to see the ‘Live Event (preview)’

Now head back to Teams Client or Web Page and create a new Live Event Meeting and the user should be able to see the ‘External Encoder’ enabled…

Awesome! Thanks for being with me on this adventure! Now your user can configure External Encoder in their Live Events!
I wish the Microsoft Teams Dev Team put a little more effort and do away with this adventure and let the administrator enable/disable the External Encoder from the GUI itself… IMHO, PowerShell for this is overkill as only a few people will be given this magic gauntlet
What Next? I want more adventure…
Now may be a good time to check out Luca Vitali’s article on how to use OBS as a external encoder for your event at https://lucavitali.wordpress.com/2018/08/24/how-to-use-obs-studio-external-encoder-for-live-events/
For other more ‘Not Free’ solutions head on to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/live-encoder-setup
All the Best!!
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