Office Hours Recap: SimuLive vs. Production Studio, Certification Updates & Keeping Webinars From Getting Boring
If you missed Wednesday's bonus AMA, you missed a good one. No agenda, no slides — just an hour of real questions from real Zoom Events and Webinars Plus users, answered live. Here's what came out of it.
Highlights
Simulive vs. Production Studio, settled once and for all. This comes up constantly, so we made Mike answer it properly: if your event repeats often and the content doesn't change much, Simulive is your friend — set it, forget it, let it run. If you want more flexibility (intro/outro/countdown videos, scene switching, playing a clip at exactly the right moment), Production Studio gives you that control. Mike's team runs their weekly YouTube shows entirely on Production Studio scenes for this reason. Want to watch Mike give the quick run down? here you go
Certifications just got a lot more flexible. They now work across single, recurring, multi-session, and older/legacy events — previously you'd have had to duplicate a recurring session to add them. You can also manually push or revoke a certificate instead of relying only on automatic sends, which is handy if you want to eyeball things before they go out. Learn more about certifications
A workaround for recurring paid programs. If you're running a multi-session paid program and need to cut off access mid-series when someone stops paying, ticket access control is your friend — set up a "green light" ticket (full access) and a "red light" ticket (no session access) and switch attendees between them. Not as clean as a native unregister, but it works.
Allow lists scale further than you'd think. Mike has added tens of thousands of entries without hitting a limit — worth knowing if you've been hesitant to lean on allow lists for larger programs.
Polls and quizzes are your best engagement signal, not just a nice-to-have. Mike shared how his team uses recurring "confidence check" polls to measure whether their own messaging is landing over time — and pairing that with the AI Analytics features lets you track a person's or an audience's engagement across your whole event history.
How do I keep my webinar from feeling boring? Josh's rule of thumb: re-engage your audience every 7-12 minutes — a poll, a quick Q&A pause, a game, or even just a joke. Presenters aren't always the best at driving this themselves, so it might be worth building a dedicated on-screen host or moderator whose job is just to keep the energy up. Hear more about the 7-12 minute rule
From the community
"Is there something we're missing when we cancel an event, but a reminder email still goes out?" — Jen's question sparked a good back-and-forth on making sure event cancellation and calendar/reminder settings are actually in sync — worth double-checking if you've seen this.
"Can we get a scene option with just an image and a presenter?" — Kimberly flagged that Production Studio scenes currently support video+presenter but not image+presenter, and asked for a workaround-free option. Fresh scene layouts are on the way — this kind of feedback is exactly what's shaping them.
A shoutout worth repeating: Robert thanked the team for the recent increase in interpreters allowed per event — jumping from 100 to 300 — a change that's made a real logistical difference for multilingual, multi-session events.
Join us next time
We're back next Wednesday, same time, covering the July release — new features, live demos, and (of course) more questions. Bring yours.