NEW! Introducing Session Webinars and Q&A 🤩

Today, Session announced a major release of Webinars, a new set of features that makes scheduling, hosting, and managing a webinar lightning-fast and simple.

This work has been months in the making and a huge shoutout to the Session product and engineering teams for delivering a brilliant solution in record time. More on webinars below.

Session also released the Q&A feature as a new tool, available in your Session account now.

Session Q&A has arrived

Turn on Session Q&A via the Tools menu in the bottom right of your screen.

This tool lets participants ask questions outside of the chatbox for easy sorting and interactions, including the ability to

• Upvote/downvote

• Ask anonymously

• Filter by newest, oldest, most popular

• Mark questions answered

• Highlight questions on stage

Give it a try in your next webinar!

Speaking of webinars...

OK, so Webinars. What's different?

Previously, Session let you create Rooms. These Rooms lived on a shareable URL and were accessible at any time — the Product team called these Rooms "persistent." It worked and still works well for jumping in and out of meetings and other experiences.

Now, Session has added Webinars. Webinars introduce an event lifecycle for users to be able to manage their online experiences like events — with pre-event, during-event, and post-event workflows.

Today, Session offers both Rooms and Webinars, to give our users the optimal flexibility for their wide range of video engagement use cases.

Hopineers: Share all feedback with us in the #jm-session-feedback Slack channel.

How is this different from Hopin?

While you can host a webinar on either Session or Hopin Events, there are differences, the most high-level of which could be summarized as follows — Session Webinars are extremely lightweight and take one person less than five minutes to set up. The Hopin events platform is robust and deeply customizable, with more advanced features and production capabilities.

Stay tuned for more documentation on how to choose the right platform for your use case.

Hopineers: Please let us know your thoughts in the #jm-session-early-access Slack channel.

How to create a webinar in Session

• Select Webinar at the top of your Session dashboard.

• Name your webinar and set the start time and duration. Note: the name is also the text in the URL.

• Select a room theme: Presentation or Webinar. Note: these names are being updated soon.

• You land in the Lobby of your webinar and now you can begin customizing the experience just like you would with a Room. The difference is that your lobby now has a lightweight email reminder system and add-to-calendar buttons.

Managing your webinar in Session

• After you've created your webinar, you can view and manage it from your Session dashboard by clicking "Webinars" and then "Upcoming" or "Ended."

• Click the webinar card to pull up the management portal:

Here you can:

• Edit details of the webinar

• See how many people signed up for email notifications

• Share the host link

• Start the webinar early if you wish

• Duplicate the webinar for the next time

• Delete the webinar

After the webinar concludes

• Participants who land on the URL post-event will see a landing page after the Session Webinar ends.

• You (Room Owners) can easily view and export the emails from your webinar by clicking the View button on the webinar card. Reminder, the full list of attendees can be exported from the History page.

Other notes

• Keep in mind that this is the Session Webinar MVP — more updates are coming soon. We're just getting started!

• Find any bugs or glitches? Report using the question mark button in the app.

• Submit more customers and prospects who can move fast with webinar use cases to the Early Access Program using the workflow in the #jm-session-early-access Slack channel.