Teams Webinar/Meeting cancellation notices sent after registration requirements changed

Question

Recently organized a Teams webinar via the Teams desktop client (Windows 10) and required registration for everyone initially, so we could poll for questions attendees might have ahead of the Q&A portion of the presentation. We then decided to not require registration anymore starting the morning of the webinar, so as not to deter any last minute attendees with the registration process. I changed the registration requirement to "none", then clicked to Save/Send Update. I then received reports from the previously registered attendees, saying they received cancellation notices for the meeting... but I didn't cancel the meeting, I only removed the registration requirement moving forward. It caused a lot of confusion and last minute manual communications to keep attendee calendars open for the event. The meeting join link stayed exactly the same after the change as well, so it's not like it was trying to create a brand new meeting instance after I made the change...

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Why did this happen?

Answer 1

Hi @Jessica Marsden ,

Based on my research and test, it's likely to be a by design behavior for Teams webinars, which might be due to the consideration that webinars are designed to be a meeting with registration added to it.

The link below is a thread which was posted around one year ago that discusses a similar scenario:
Event Cancelled, which wasn't cancelled

I've also tested in my lab and can reproduce what you described. After changing "Require registration" to "None", the previously registered attendees received a cancellation notification.

The subject of this notification is corresponding to the title of the registration form I created earlier, which is kinda of different from a real meeting cancellation whose subject is reflecting the meeting title:


Despite of these differences, totally agree on that the current behavior can indeed lead to confusions for previously registered attendees.

That being said, considering that the behavior hasn't been changed yet. I just tried submitting a feature request via the dedicated feedback portal for Microsoft Teams. The link would be left below so that you or other community users who see this thread can also help vote or comment there as well. Hopefully this behavior can be improved in the near future.
Do not send cancellation notification to previously registered webinar attendees after updating registration requirement to "None"

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