Thanks to Jabra, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of the community and helping making content like this possible.
Thanks to Jabra, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of the community and helping making content like this possible.
In this Microsoft Teams Insider podcast, we have friend of the show, Michael Tresler. I'm pretty sure everybody in the community knows Michael either from his time at Microsoft or his YouTube channel Or his globe trotting at various events In this pod we did something a bit different. I wanted to get the whole backstory on Michael kind of the pre Microsoft days How he ended up at Microsoft what he was doing and then how he's moved on to Jabra and what he's doing today Thanks very much to Jabra for being the sponsor of this podcast really appreciate their support with empowering cloud And thanks to Michael for taking the time to give us the full backstory. I hope you enjoy it on with the show You Hey everybody. Welcome back to the pod. Really excited for this one. Got a, good friend. He's promised to do a big life story reveal on the podcast. So things you've never heard before from the man that is Michael Tresler. Hey, Michael, do you just want to say hello?
Michael Tressler:I just want to say hello. Are we done now?
Tom Arbuthnot:We're done. We can call it a day.
Michael Tressler:All right. Good seeing you again, Tom.
Tom Arbuthnot:Everybody listening to this pod, because it's basically the community, probably know the name, know the face, but, give us some background, pre Microsoft, the Microsoft role and how you've now ended up at Jabra.
Michael Tressler:Very hard in my life to go back pre Microsoft. Let's go all the way back. So I was 12 ish and my dad bought me a Tandy Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 3. It was an all in one with an external tape drive, and I didn't want it. I wanted the Tandy Color computer, which my friend had because it has better games. When you're 12, that is key. My dad decided, you're gonna be a businessman one day, and so you need a business computer. I'm like, no 12 year old, just life advice for fathers and mothers. Never buy your kid a business device when they're 12. However, on that I learned BASIC on their, programmer on that track and field game where you hit the, and the buttons real fast, faster and the faster you hit it. And then there was the advanced one. You hit the button. You could hurdle. Coded that using I don't know, the Z and X key. And then a computer would randomly move between one and three squares, because they're pixels, come on. Squares, three squares, and then I can make it harder, and, as I got faster at pounding those buttons, the computer would then go between two and three squares a random number of times, right? Not really, not a lot of logic there, but, I could then play against the computer. So I coded that. There are the magazines that had all the code written in the back, so you'd type those in manually, painstakingly, but you're 12, what else do you do? So you're 12, so you type those in, they don't work. Syntax error. You don't know what syntax error means. You don't know where the mistake is. Syntax error means something's wrong. I don't know what. I give up.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. Somewhere in the last hour you spent typing, one of those characters is wrong. Good luck.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, exactly. So then you go back painstakingly, and then you learn troubleshooting, hey, I'm going to pause the code here and see if I get an error. Because the great thing about BASIC is it just goes down the line, more or less. Anyway, then computer science. Went to computer class in high school. Went to college for international business, so dad was right. Went for international business, and, back then, because I'm old, this is 1990, I switched to computer science. Software engineering was the only track at Ball State University. Mighty Ball State, the home of David Letterman and Jim Davis, the guy who draws Garfield. Two comedians, essentially, are the most famous people from my alma mater. So that, yeah, so computer science, that was the only thing, the only option was coding. So I learned C++ and then got exposed to Lisp and COBOL and FORTRAN and all those classic old languages. By the way, I believe Microsoft wrote the BASIC on the Tandy Radio Shack. I'm on a Commodore 128 at this point, so I have way upgraded. So a Commodore 128 still programming BASIC, which I believe was also provided by Microsoft. So again, it's hard to separate me from Microsoft when you go back to my first computer, to my second computer, the Commodore 128. So at the beginning of my coding career, learning, I would Write everything out in BASIC and I think early visual BASIC at that point just to get the algorithm straight and then convert it to C. It's learning a language where you hear it, you convert it to English and then think what sentence you're going to say back in English and then say it in German and grammatical errors. But, it's slow, but you did respond mostly accurately. So I'd write it in BASIC, figure out the BASIC, how the algorithm's gonna work. Then convert to C+ towards the end. I was able to think in C+ so just do it natively as I got comfortable with it. Anyway, got outta college. Oh, and by the way, in college, the thing I always liked the most, which I never had,'cause there was no networking class, there was no IT class, there was no anything but programming. So what I liked the most or was most intrigued by was how are these like term deck terminals connected to the VACs on the back end. How do these Unix terminals connect to the internet? How does the email that, usenet and all that, how does that connect with each other? That was always a little more interesting to me, but there was no curriculum in that. So at that point, I would have had to like have volunteered at the computer lab and then maybe worked my way up to learn that. But I would rather drink. So I didn't volunteer my time. yeah. Got out of college, first job was at a small AutoCAD reseller called CAD CAM Plus in Carmel, Indiana. And I know nothing about sales. I did get one life lesson, not life lesson, one sales lesson, that is when the customer says I'm willing to buy or I'm ready to buy or, who do I ship my PO. O., who gets my cash? Shut up. Say thank you and take the money. Because all you can do now is talk them out of the sale. Example being like, oh my god, Empowering.Cloud, they're great, I just thank you so much for being a subscriber, there's so many things coming up in the future. We've had some problems with our URL redirects. And, some of our contributors aren't contributing much, but trust me, we'll get that figured out. wait, what?
Tom Arbuthnot:Classic technology is oversharing.
Michael Tressler:Wait, hold on. Maybe I want to give you the money in six months. Once you've fixed this.. Like, why am I giving it to you now? So that's the one lesson I still, through to today. Like when I sold my house in Indianapolis and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, at the closing, I was probably the biggest jerk because I said nothing.
Tom Arbuthnot:I'm only going to, cause trouble if I talk.
Michael Tressler:Because all I can do is talk about, hey, yeah, the house is great. The windows are crap though. That one window sticks, this light switch. If you can ever figure out what it does, I don't know what it does. You really need to put some insulation underneath the floor in the master bedroom because it gets really cold in winter. Like next thing, you're trying to be helpful. Next thing you know, they're going, wait a second. We have not signed the papers yet. Checks have not traded hands. So I was just being quiet, just cordial, but quiet. Yes, no. So did you like the house? Loved it. That's it. Just boom, done. They probably thought I was like, who is, God, this guy is just, he's boring. Who's this guy we're buying this house off of? I'm like, I'm not losing this sale. I need to get this house sold. I know I'm paying for two places, a place in Nashville and my mortgage in Indianapolis. So we got to get this going. Anyway, joined CAD CAM Plus, did inside sales. And during the downtime. Two of the co workers I worked with were former DEC, Digital Equipment. They sold, they were direct in line with Digital Equipment. They got us an early Alpha, forget the exact model number, DEC Alpha, and we threw Windows NT 3.1 on it. So I would go downstairs and just... Bang away at it. Learn it. Windows NT 3.1. I already knew Windows. Oh, by this time I had upgraded to a 486 DX 250 with...
Tom Arbuthnot:Oh, so not the 100. You struggled on with the 50.
Michael Tressler:8MB of RAM and a 210GB Connor hard drive. I believe were the specs on that. So now, so I've been using Windows there. I worked at the Ball State Police Station. They had Windows 2.0, which was the first and only time I've ever seen that. Anyway, so I learned Windows NT 3.1, and at this point then, those guys were like, he's way too technically sharp, and he's a terrible salesperson. They started sending me out on jobs. So at that point, it was installing Lantastic, if we all remember that. It was a great peer to peer networking, up to about 30 people, and We get to the 31st person and the whole thing crashes, the whole network just comes to a halt. So they needed a solution that could get beyond that problem. Also CAD files are big, they are today, they were doubly so in 1993 or 1994. We didn't have a Novell person on staff, it was me, the only person who knew. Windows NT and Windows, so we sold a few. A couple people bought off on Windows NT 3.1 as the file and print server and Windows 3.11 or Windows 4 workgroups, and that's, so again, Microsoft, you can't get me away from Microsoft. You can fast forward a bunch, Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.51, I start getting good at TCP IP wrote a chapter in this book. Let me get it real quick. There you go, Tom. Here's your own signer exclusive.
Tom Arbuthnot:See, I knew you did the book, your book, but I didn't know about this one. That's cool.
Michael Tressler:Windows NT troubleshooting and configuration by Robert Reinstein et al. I am an et al. And in this book I wrote, how to set up DHCP. For, Windows NT and TCPIP and connectivity with Linux in here. Basically how to telnet. Michael Tressler graduated from Ball State University in 1993 with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. there you go. It's in a book, so it happened. For the past four years he's been a Windows NT consultant, helping several of the largest companies in Indiana and the Midwest with Windows NT support. He is now the co owner of InterMix Systems, a company whose focus is the internetworking of Windows NT with legacy systems. There you go, that was my bio in, 1997. Anyway, Windows NT 351, networking, moving my way up. Exchange, so then, a decent sized real estate company in the Midwest. I started, I ended up working for them. And then I learned WAN technologies, so I was the networking guy. I was the guy who brought in Windows NT in the first place. They were maybe the first customer I ever had with Windows NT and they stuck with it. So then I learned, WAN technology as I started setting up CSU, DSUs. And, we had, a modem bank for people to dial in, 56K, a little US Robotics modem bank. The cool thing about that is it was ISDN lines feeding it, and then the, it was a T1 via ISDN, and then the US Robotics split it up to different channels, so at home, I had 128K ISDN connection. I was the boss. Y'all want to play Dune? Y'all, what, not even Dune. What was it? What was the one after that? It was actually multiplayer. It's come on over. Yeah, I got the internet, baby. I got 128K, y'all sucking at 56K, which we really know is 48K. So yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot:I remember the jump from 33k to 56k, that was like the fast thing.
Michael Tressler:Wasn't it though? And there was no sound effects, it just boom, connected. It was beautiful. I was cool. Did the firewalls there as well. Early days we brought in Microsoft Mail and then flipped that to the first version of Exchange. That migration was horrible. Horrible. Microsoft had no migration. One of the senior guys there at the real estate company, he took over that role of handling the imports. He wrote it out. It was 83 steps that includes like click okay. All right. That's one of the steps. Yeah. It was like 83 steps. There was no like point at the MS mail post office and suck it all in and then maybe you know do some manual map, The user to the mailbox or something right just that quick click this goes that this goes there this goes I this is there Windows NT. This is a preactive directory, but still this is their Windows NT ID none So anyway, I started doing Exchange firewalls, left that company went to another one in Indianapolis a small Banking operation. They were the first IB, first internet bank. There were the first internet bank based out of Indiana doing firewalls for them, doing the WAN. I got into learned how WAN failover routers work. IP redirects to get to, to get to one or the other machine F5 load balancers got into all that and then was just generalist IT as well. So I would help with Exchange. I think we had active directory by this. I think at this point we're into 2004 or 2005, whatever we're into active directory easily into that. And then, one day. I'm sitting there, doing nothing, because we were really good, because we had gotten purchased then by a company out of Connecticut and, we in Indianapolis did a real good job of pushing them off as much as we could so we could just sit there and watch football games or play fantasy football or whatever. He goes, hey Mike, we got this LCS thing, you're gonna get the OCS upgrade. I'm like, I don't know anything about it. He goes, it can't be hard. how hard can it be? All right. Okay, cool. It was hard, very hard. We had a consultant, so fortunately they're like just all the firewall stuff and OCS wanted every single port on the planet and four different, admin interfaces. So it wasn't all just in one OCS panel, it was in, you had to go here, you had to go to the Windows NT settings, you had to go to this command line thing. It was all over the place. So we got about 75 people migrated from LCS to OCS with calling, by the way, to add to the fund. We did, this was OCS 2007 R2. So we did have calling enabled you. We had heard then, we were about three or four months into the project that, the upgrade called Link was coming out. And I just told my boss, hey, can we just pause this? Because in two months Link is coming out, so let's just wait, upgrade to Link. It's supposed to be so much better, let's wait, migrate to that, and go. So we did. We waited, migrated from OCS to Link. Also, not easy, but fortunately we only had 75 people on OCS because LCS wasn't heavily used either. LCS was more of a trial thing for 15 to 20 people. Moved to Lync, that was a couple of long days and nights, mostly in the work design and then the final cutover. Because again, we're now, we have 75 people's phone numbers and some of them, unlike us nowadays, some of these...
Tom Arbuthnot:People actually use their phones back then. Yeah, it was actually a really big deal to do all this stuff.
Michael Tressler:So we cut it over, and everything went well, and that was my intro into Lync, and there were a couple people, some of them still in the industry, some not, anymore, that had blog articles, that were really useful, but they were all over the place, and I didn't want to check 17 websites once or twice a week. So I don't know if you remember my little, news aggregator. I see now is how it ended up. So that's where that news aggregator started is I created all that, then created an app for Windows Phone for that app. I finally killed it. I don't keep up with it anymore. A few people have reached out going, Oh, whatever happened. I'm like, sorry, that there's a whole new worlds of
Tom Arbuthnot:Because all the blogs cycle as well. Don't they? So you have to keep up with the sourcing.
Michael Tressler:It was all blogs. Then now there's a lot of YouTube, two Tik Toks I've seen, but it's all, YouTube, life, more life forums, more live events there were none back then, there were no webinars or anything like that. I just lost interest. That's the reason that's the reason it died. Anyway, so then. Upgraded from Lync to Skype. We did the Skype update. had it out on LinkedIn, I think, that I knew SBAs. And I got a hit from a recruiter to say, Hey, do you want to move to Deloitte in Nashville? Did an interview. Apparently they only found two people who even know how to spell SBA, Survival Branch Appliances. And apparently the other person they interviewed basically knew how to spell it, but had zero experience, didn't know what it was. I was raw with SBAs where I had implemented three of them, one in Chicago, one in New Jersey and one somewhere else.
Tom Arbuthnot:You were probably one of about 50 or 100 people that had done it at that point.
Michael Tressler:On the planet, that's right. and then they gave me an offer financially I couldn't refuse. Then I moved from Indianapolis to Nashville, did SBAs for three years and almost exclusively Enterprise Voice. That led to writing the book. Writing the book was weird and fun and crazy. It's because every time you sit there writing. You have no idea is someone who, going to release the same thing. and I, just because I like them, I'd still buy them the Skype Unleashed and Skype for Business Unleashed.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah, I did the chapter for unleashed.
Michael Tressler:So I'd look at them, like, how deep are they getting into calling? How deep are they going to think it's. One solid 30 page chapter really solid, but yeah, I'm gonna do 250 pages. So I you know, it's a race and then at other times you're like man I just need to get away from this thing So I did all the writing in my own time because you get into that situation can Deloitte claim Authorship and ownership of it. So I made a point that I never did anything except for evenings and weekends. So then you lose your evenings and weekends. but I learned so much that, so I first started writing that book like three years before, and I thought I had two and a half chapters done. I'm like, this won't be hard. I'll just write, five more chapters, call it a day. No, I had an intro and part of chapter one done and part of chapter one had so many mistakes because I'd learned so much more. I'm like, I got to start from scratch. That got me the Skype for Business books, that's where it is. It's now unpublished. You can't buy it anymore, except for aftermarket, just because it's gotten sold. I don't even know if that site's still up, Enterprise Voice Skype for Business. That was a webpage for the book. I think I posted the PDF there for free downloads. If anybody wants it, email me. Does Empowering.Cloud want an archive of an old book.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. if you want to like a history lesson in Skype for business.
Michael Tressler:But I'm not great at Teams calling. But what I've heard is that most of the Skype stuff applies to the Teams calling.
Tom Arbuthnot:A lot of the fundamentals. It was the same team that where they built the voice architecture, basically, but it's just so much easier and different these days than when we were busy deploying, like say there's multiple roles.
Michael Tressler:And a lot less PowerShell.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah, a lot less, Windows Fabric, which was always fun.
Michael Tressler:Oh, the joy of spending a long weekend or a long, Wednesday evening when Windows PowerShell aired and you run the commands and then it didn't solve it. Then you open a case. Now you have a global outage because at Deloitte it was 40, 000 users using our Skype pools. So that's a quality outage. And then we had SBAs. Fortunately, the SBAs generally continued working for local calling, which is the whole point of a survival bridge. Appliance if the parent pool dies. They can at least make and receive phone calls still.
Tom Arbuthnot:How did you get from that big architecture at Deloitte over to Microsoft?
Michael Tressler:We're having a Christmas time lunch, a couple of Deloitte co workers Hey, you know what, let's blow off and have a two or three hour lunch and maybe come back to work. So we went to this burger joint in East Nashville. And had, burgers and a beer or two. And people get like going up to the restaurant. But I just grabbed my phone and check. Cause now we have phones that actually do stuff as opposed to way back when, but when this phone was great rip and I checked my phone, there's an email and it's from Microsoft recruiting and I showed it to my coworker at the time do you think this is legit or is this spam? He reads it and goes, that's legit and I would respond. So I did. And after two, three months of, the interview cycle, I joined Microsoft in MCS consulting. The book I brought up to my future boss during the interview things like, Hey, I'm about to release this book. How does this tie in with Microsoft? Can I do this? Blah, blah, blah. And he just looks at me and goes, if you release it the day before you start, it's not a problem. So I released it the day before I started, and then it wasn't done with all the proofing and editing, so the first people who bought it, the book in the first month, there are errors and there's a, there's an addendum on the website with all the corrections, about 30 corrections. The good thing about using Amazon, the Kindle Publishing, whatever it's called, is that you can just send a new manuscript, and the books were printed on demand. So it wasn't like, I'm going to fund 500 and hope I sell it, it's air printed on demand.
Tom Arbuthnot:I've got a physical copy somewhere, I don't know where, I don't think it was first month, so I probably got one with less typos.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, there are a few people that had the first copy, and so when I pulled the book from resale, I had them print one last copy, because I only had the sample copy. I never had a final book, so I think, I should have two copies somewhere. Anyway, so then I joined Microsoft and that was a little disappointing because I never did. Oh, by the way through all that Skype stuff I think that's I was known as flinch bot. So everything was at flinch bot I didn't go to any conferences because I couldn't afford it and there weren't but there's like Lync conference Yeah, this is a second Lync conference in Vegas.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah, I think the first time we met you were already at Deloitte by that point.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, that would have been the second link conference if we met, that would have been there. So I, I was pretty anonymous. A lot of people were like, does this person even exist? who is this person? If you really wanted to care, you could do a lookup. who is flinchtbot. com, see Michael Tressler person in Nashville, Tennessee or whatever. When I joined Microsoft, I then realized I probably need my name now, as opposed to just the handle. So then I started using my real name. a lot of times, a lot of people then were like, holy crap, you're FlinchBot? I'm like, yeah, disappointing, isn't it? And then at Microsoft, the first two, three years were a little disappointing cause I did zero Skype or Lync stuff. Almost none. I did one, which was really nice in Des Moines, Iowa. Spent eight weeks there they're like, Hey, our Skype for Business isn't as stable as we'd like. And it was cool because I got to talk to the firewall people, the router people, the WiFi people, the server people, the client, who makes the client images, all of them had reports and charts and ended up giving like a 30 page report with graphics and charts and whatever with priorities. These are the high priority things you should focus on first. Here are the lower priority things. And then here's just like best practice stuff that you aren't doing, it won't make a tangible change to the reliability of the system, but maybe your operations can improve. That was the only thing I did in two or three years. That was Skype or Lync at all. I did a Windows 7 migration for the IRS?
Tom Arbuthnot:Oh, that sounds dull.
Michael Tressler:Talk about easy money. get a government gig. I found an obscure bug for people who are hard of hearing or blind and have to use the keyboard navigation on the accessibility. It skipped, it skips a menu on the accessibility during using the keyboard. That's the bug I found obscure, and it was like in the help system, so it wasn't even the main ones, but whatever, I found it. We submitted it. I don't know if it got fixed anyway. Then I did a year. traveled about 42 times in the year and I like travel. So that was the network performance assessment that we did at Microsoft. So that was Microsoft 365. So at least I'm getting to cloudy stuff. Now I'm getting off premises and the NPA, a customer would take five laptops, throw them at five different locations in their organization, headquarters, a factory, a office in China an office in India, two offices in Germany, whatever, and it would just sit there for a week collecting data. So I think at that point there was a Skype assessment tool, network assessment tool, which we would automate and run every five minutes. And it would ping Skype, make a Skype phone call, whatever we'd collect that data, upload a file to OneDrive every hour and then download the file. So after five days, we got all this data, I'd go on site, to collect the data, give them some training on how, Office 365 networking works, which if you've seen the Teams Rooms Windows training that I did, the boot camps back then, Module 2 is, how does Office 365 networking work? having done a year of NPAs directly led to, one, me wanting to put that module into the curriculum, and two, being qualified to speak to it. So it worked out. anyway, so I did that for a year. And, by the way, we're heading into COVID. About November of that year, Yoav Barzilai, you probably know Yoav, if not, a lot of people do, for those who don't know, he was a Skype guy back in the day, also a blogger, Yoav without a zero, I think was his name, was the blog, or Yoav with a zero? Yoav with a zero. Then he started switching to a lot of Surface Hub blogging. So Yoav was a guy, so we both joined Microsoft within a year or two of each other. Kept in touch. He was asked, do you want to create the curriculum for Teams Rooms, Windows? Because the problem was in device partner sales at Microsoft, the partners were coming back saying, we'd love to sell Teams Rooms, Windows. We don't know how it works. And if we don't know how it works, and if our engineers and installers don't know it, we're not gonna sell it. So it was a blocker to sales. So Yoav somehow was involved, but at the same time, Yoav was heavily contemplating a move to the United States to join the Surface Hub team. So he decided he'd rather do Surface Hub, which was the right call today as we sit here with our feet on the ground where it's Teams Rooms in some mythical Surface Hub three,
Tom Arbuthnot:It's gone full circle.
Michael Tressler:They asked him, hey, do you know anyone who else who could do this, right? If you're gonna leave us with this project and he mentioned me and so they air quotes interviewed me and then I took over He hadn't done much right because it was just he picked it up like after two or three weeks Of some basic research. He then said look I'm gonna go to the Surface Hub team. I can't do this. Then myself and a guy named Nate Smyre, I knew Nate from Nashville, he was in the Teams Users Group there. And one of those things, I moved from Nashville to St. Petersburg, Florida. And Nate reaches out to me and goes, hey, do you want to buy my speakers? He's a big audiophile. He makes his own speakers. One of those kind of people. Literally, he's got pictures with the vice grips, clamps, for the wood case that he built. Not just attaching speakers to a case. He built the case himself. All of that. He's hey, you want some of these? I'm like, man, I just moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. I'm in an apartment. I can't. no. If I were moving into a house, sure. And he's wait, what? You moved to St. Petersburg, Florida? Yeah. He goes, I'm moving there next month. My cool. He's like, where did, where'd you move to? I point like the apartment I was in. He goes, yeah, I'm moving a block away unbeknownst. So Nate and I have known, each other for a while. It's one of those deals where I did 80 of the work on the Teams Rooms Windows thing, Nate only did one module. So one out of 12 on it. No, it ended up being two 25%. I'm like. His contribution was meaningless only 25%. Why do I bring him up? It was the hard 25 percent I did the 75 percent in the same amount of time He did the 25 percent because that was the module 6 and 7
Tom Arbuthnot:Which bits did he do then?
Michael Tressler:The security modules God bless the Teams Rooms team But they hadn't formally thought or documented a lot of this stuff. It was in- house tribal knowledge and we hadn't converted to public, easily accessible knowledge. The Resource Account. You can blame Nate and myself for calling it the Teams Windows Resource Account. If you hate it, which I know one person who does. They say it should be something else like the device account. You have a fair argument, but we looked at Docs back then I'm like, what's what's the name of this account because we've got to train people on how to create this account. There are three different names for the same account in Docs So they had never formalized in the Teams Rooms Windows thing. So we picked the one. It's an Exchange Resource Account, really? And it just signs into Teams Rooms. So that's why it's called a Resource Account because it's an exchange Resource Account, nothing wrong with Device Account. I think Surface Hub team uses Device Account for their name. so yeah, Nate was working with some people in the financial industry. And they were deploying Teams Rooms Windows. He was getting hit constantly with these questions. He ended up knowing some of the people asking those questions and sitting on calls with the, the Teams Rooms leadership and the IT leadership or whatever security at the bank and him. So he then say, I'll write the training modules for that, in tune conditional access. That stuff was never documented or heavily even tested. Yet, everybody was using it, so the first stabs at it, Nate did, and then there was a tech community article, I forget the name of the Microsoft guy who wrote it. Those were the first stabs at trying to formalize all that. That's when the first bootcamps came out. These questions were coming in, I'd never used Teams Rooms Window or Skype or Lync Room Systems before. So I was very new to it. So we did the first bootcamp, these questions were coming out, and I'm like, what the hell is an EDID? What's an EDID minder? These people are asking questions, but I don't even know what that is. I do now! Nate and I did it mostly, and there were some contributions from others. But, those are the two of us were the main ones. From about February through May, and then we did the boot camp in June or July. So I had six months experience, but never in production. And then you get these AV guys, like Harold Steindl and some of these other guys running around just... have lived this for 30 years and I'm like, I don't even know what that means. I've never heard of it.
Tom Arbuthnot:But it's different worlds coming together, isn't it? It's your heritage in networks and infrastructure and LCS and OCS, and it all comes together, but now you've got the AV world coming into our world as well. That, that's all new to me as well. You talk to AV people, it's a whole different art and science over on that side as well.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, a computer is not a computer, it's a Codec. It's not, what is it, what is the Dell or whatever, the ThinkSmart or whatever that's running the, room system. It's, what's the Codec? Ah, it's a ThinkSmart Core. It's a Intel NUC. A Codec? What the hell's a Codec? isn't a Codec a software piece that turns like, music into an MP3? Isn't that what a Codec does? It does, but back in the day.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah.
Michael Tressler:And to your point, my whole experience that I went through where I, I glossed over some, but I did networking and firewalls and Exchange and active directory and DNS. That's one thing I really liked about Skype and Lync is that you had to know all of that. You had to know how the firewall worked and how Edge servers worked and how do you set up all the DNS entries.
Tom Arbuthnot:And you had to be able to interface with all those different teams. You had to be able to talk the firewall people's languages, be able to talk to the security team, be able to talk to the identity team, like all of those teams would, you'd engage with on a project. It was a real complex piece. It was good fun when it was in the glory days.
Michael Tressler:Yeah. I liked it because you had to be, you had to know a little bit about. Everything in IT We have new user accounts, how do you automate giving them Skype rights? what groups do they need? Do they need a phone number? How do you automate all that? So now you're working with a whole HR system to try to automate things. I know at Deloitte, we would scan the OU looking for new accounts and then just automate them like four times a day. And usually people didn't start for a week or two after that account was created. So it worked out fine, but, so we didn't interface directly with it. We kind of brute forced it, but it worked fine. Teams Rooms Windows, bootcamps, kept doing all of that. And then Team Rooms Android got released. And then I'm like, how do I fit Teams Rooms Android into the Teams Rooms Windows training and just call it Teams Rooms? Because there's a lot of similarities, but there's a ton of differences.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah, I'd say there's more differences than similarities, if we're honest.
Michael Tressler:So I'd started trying to figure out how to create one module then, like Teams Rooms Android. Okay, you've learned all this Teams Rooms Windows stuff, Teams Rooms Android, we still use a Resource Account, we still use a lot of the same stuff, I don't have to go through the features, we've already discussed what casting is, or whatever. We've already discussed all that. So I started on that, and then, people know people, and somebody said this guy named Tony Woodruff is working on a Teams Android training for phones. I had given the thought that, what if I just punt making a Teams Room thing, and just make Teams Android devices generic training. So Tony and I, they became best friends, and we had already known each other. We'd met in person at Microsoft Ready, which is an internal Microsoft conference a year or two before. So we already knew each other, but we weren't talking on a daily basis. like we ended up, so Tony and I wrote the Teams Android Devices training. I think that also broke out the way Nate and mine did. And then I did 75 percent of it. Tony did 25 percent of it, but he got the fun part, the Intune conditional access piece and security. Which wasn't codified either, whereas the rest of it was pretty well, here's how you make a phone call, here's how you set up whatever. There's docs articles for it, but there were no docs articles on, on, Android open source platform, AOSP and kiosk mode and that stuff. Tony got to figure all that out. I just took screenshots of the interface and explained what they were. Tony had to create new knowledge, essentially. So then we did the bootcamp. Then we did the Android devices, bootcamp and then life happens and Jabra reached out and said, Hey, you should join our team. I had known already Mickey Haley from Jabra. She's one of the people that handles the Jabra and Microsoft relationship. the summer before, I guess it's been a year ago. she like NDA'd me that Jabra was releasing an Android bar. Teams Rooms Android device.
Tom Arbuthnot:Let's, let's hang on. Let's dive into this. So first of all, what's your role at Jabra now? You should know it by now.
Michael Tressler:I was going to make up a name., Nothing funny popped into my head. Senior solutions consultant, though it may be now senior channels. Consultant channel solution? I don't know. I go by senior solutions consultant. I work with a guy named Schroth Abraham, and he has like senior channel consultant or something different. My job, regardless of what the title is pre-sales technical support. Helping customers understand what our products are. Like even Hey, Jabra makes video cameras like to, yeah. For those who don't know, Jabra we're one of, if not the largest seller of headsets, contact center, hybrid workers, that sort of thing.
Tom Arbuthnot:So yeah, real specialist in audio loads of like medical audio, like hearing aids and all that Super, super well known brand for audio, but pushing aggressively into video, especially when you consider the timelines. So first on Windows with the P50 and now into Android, which I want to talk
Michael Tressler:And before that, the OG PanaCast. Which is, 180 degree field of view tiny guy, then that people are like, okay, the video is cool. Can you add speaker and microphone in? That's where the Panacast 50 came in then with the speakers, microphone, all that. So my job is to explain what it does to customers, how it works, do lunch and learns. With customers, get on customer calls, generally not once they've purchased them, that becomes a support function because they've already bought it, but doesn't mean that doesn't happen either. often like the channel is Hey, you know what? I don't want to open a support case. It seems like a simple question. Can it do this? Hey, the customer's asking, what does the port on the back do? And can they use it for that or whatever? Okay. We'll respond to those, but if it's like, Hey, this thing isn't working. Or this feature doesn't work, Or we're having trouble doing this. Yeah. Open a support case. That's post sales support. I am in the channel side. I was originally Jack of all trades as we've grown the group. Everybody did everything. So by Jack of all trades would mean Hey, I would talk to Microsoft. Microsoft's looking to buy some, and then I would also talk to Ingram TD Cinex, AVI- SPL, AVI systems, the channel partners, by the distributors or integrators. And I really like talking to that. At Microsoft, technically, I was on the channel side, the partner side. All the boot camps were meant for the partners so they could learn how to use them so they could sell more. So it was always partner side. And as our group has grown and matured, let's say, there are now two of us that do channel only, and there are two of us that do end customer only. Though we still cross streams. So Rob Houston was at a channel event just because Sharath Abrahams, would you, can you believe he didn't want to travel the weekend of his daughter's first birthday? So Rob Houston came. so we do crossover and we got this call with Microsoft or. One of our other customers, but my primary focus in a lot of the travel lately is to channel partners.
Tom Arbuthnot:Awesome. And let's dive into that kind of Jabra video story. So you say there was the camera, then there was the P50 bar, and now you've just GA'd the first Android bar. So what was the motivation there to jump into the Android game as well as the Windows?
Michael Tressler:The Panacast 50, the one that has been out for two years, almost exactly two years now, is USB only. Which is great, because it can connect to your laptop, it can connect to a Mac, it can connect to Barco, and Airtame, and Immersive, and Crestron Airmedia, and all of those kind of wireless sharing things. It can connect to Teams Room's Windows, it can connect to Zoom Room, it can connect to whatever. It's a USB peripheral. A really good USB peripheral, but it's just the USB peripheral so that it's extremely flexible. The problem is, you need, and I'll use the AV term, a Codec to, to drive it. It sends video and something needs to catch that video and do something with it. Again, like a laptop, the Teams client catches that video off the USB port and then pushes it into the meeting or whatever. Just like we went from the original PanaCast, customers were like, hey, that'd be cool if it was an all in one bar. Customers also came back and said, you know what'd be cool? If we didn't have to, bring in an external Codec, an external compute module. If we didn't have to bring in, anything else. So it's okay, we can do it all in one. It's already a fairly mature market on the Android side. Microsoft is doing a good job of trying to add a bunch of new features. So that's where it came from, was. Our fanboys and fangirls were like, but if this could be an all in one that was absolutely an all in one, wouldn't that be awesome? So that's where that came from.
Tom Arbuthnot:That's interesting. And that makes sense from what's in the market, which is people are wanting to scale out these rooms, install them easier, simpler, faster. So like screen, bar, job done basically.
Michael Tressler:And then, as people are refitting their conference rooms. A lot of the small ones. you put a table against the wall. Only our camera can show the whole room. Everyone else, there's the corners. if you imagine where the monitors are hanging on the wall, if you put the camera above or below the monitor, those corners are invisible to almost every camera on the market except ours. So in a small room, you can, you could then slide in.
Tom Arbuthnot:And that's because really you're stitching together three cameras, aren't you? So you've got cameras that have that width.
Michael Tressler:For those of you who don't know. It's 180 degree field of view. Most of the cameras in the AV marketplace are anywhere from 90 to about 110. I think there's some 120s running around. 120 degree field of view. The human eye, I believe, according to the Wikipedia article, is a 190 degree field of view. So if you take your two hands and put them like parallel or whatever, Horizontal, perpendicular, whatever, with your eyes, you can see your hands. That is what our camera does. It can see that full range around, so you can see from the side, all the way around to the other side. It does that by using three cameras. We're getting nerdy here. Each camera has,
Tom Arbuthnot:We can go deep. It's good.
Michael Tressler:Let's go deep. Each individual camera, it's a 13 megapixel 4K camera in all three of them, but they only have an 80 degree field of view. 80 degrees times 3 is 240 degrees, so what do we do with 180 degrees? We overlap. the cameras overlap, so that we can have full coverage, so it's not like you jump to another camera. We actually real time stitch the image together, and so that 240 degrees ends up being 180 degree usable when you overlap the things. The overlap also, and here's getting nerdy. The overlap isn't static, so it doesn't mean okay, 30 or 20 degrees from one camera overlaps with 20 degrees of another 15 degrees overlaps, we can do a zero and 30 degree or 30 degree and zero, so we can move the seam to try to keep a person on one camera as possible, because once you get into the seam and you have to stitch things together, it's hard to tell visually when you're between seams, when you're walking around, it's, No pun intended seamless, however, just the math and the AI required, you have a better image if you can have a person locked into just one camera.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. And typically once you're settled down in the conference, you're not always jumping about. So actually that makes a lot of sense..
Michael Tressler:Now what happens if two people are half on the seam and then that's for the AI, that's for our developers to figure out and we're still constantly working on improving. The algorithm making smoother transitions,
Tom Arbuthnot:You're doing a lot as well. You're really at the front in terms of the multi stream stuff, in terms of the intelligent speaker being baked into the bar. So it feels like from not being a video company, you're very quickly putting in the leading features.
Michael Tressler:So we kind of, used the cheat code and bought a company called Altia Systems Several years ago. So that's Because I asked Mickey when I first saw this. I'm like, hey Mickey how the hell did Jabra suddenly get good at video like usually you see a single camera And then you start seeing a portfolio grow and then finally after the fifth camera like oh, they got it, right. This one's awesome and Jabra just jumped right ahead to not only do we have it, right? But a market leading camera, so they bought Altia And what was your question?
Tom Arbuthnot:It seems the level of investment you have in video where you're like, one of the first devices to be talking about multi stream and the first device to have an intelligent speaker built into the bar., So when they designed the PanaCast 50, and to a little extent, this PanaCast, this little guy has. intelligent zoom capability, so I can find the left most and right most person and zoom into them because at 180 degrees, the cool thing is you see the whole room. The downside is you see the whole room. So if I'm looking at a conference room that only has two people in it, do I really need to see the plants on the side? No, I just really want to just zoom in on those two. So when they designed the PanaCast 50, they eight AI chips for different video and audio processing plus, core processors and all that. So there's a lot of, intelligence, the hardware level built into those things. So as Microsoft releases, multi stream where it'll probably be the second one, the Yealink S60, which Microsoft helped develop is first, we'll be the first bar to do intelligent speaker. If you guys don't know what this stuff is, go to Empowering.Cloud. There's plenty of information on what is intelligent speaker and what is multistream. If not, there will be soon. It's all there yep.
Michael Tressler:The first front of room all in one to do intelligent speaker as it is now, it's three speaker pucks that have to be on the table. We solve for not having to run a USB cable to a table. Running things to tables can be a challenge. So now you can do Intelligent Speaker without having to run cables. we're adding in virtual walls. So again, our camera sees everything. So if there's glass walls, it sees people outside the conference room. Coming Really soon is our intelligent speaker feature kind of virtual wall. So now like you see it, I was at a conference with the camera when there's 400 people walking around there's somebody always at 180 degrees left and 180 degrees, right? So you don't care really demo intelligence zoom. It'd be really cool to say, Hey, our booth is three meters wide by four meters deep. Only zoom in on people in that three by four space, even though there's 200 people milling around. Yeah, ignore them.
Tom Arbuthnot:This is the stuff that's because of what Microsoft is doing with. Copilot and Teams Premium, like we're going to have more technology in the rooms to get, transcripts, to get the framing, I'm really excited about multi stream being able to give us intelligent edge, multiple streams as well.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, it's fun to work at a company that the camera's two years old and we're still one of, if not the lead partner with Microsoft or the first person, the first company to come out with a feature in about a year or two, a device that does intelligent speaker. It's been the same three for at least a year. No one else has put one out and there probably wasn't a reason to put one out because intelligent speaker was super niche, but now with Copilot and Teams Premium Meeting Recap, it's no longer going to be super niche. Normies like us can take advantage of intelligent speaker now.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. I've seen a big peak in Oh, there's a point to this now. It's Copilot basically like we're going to need decent transcripts. So as before, like you say, it was a kind of a nice to have potentially, but now
Michael Tressler:It was primarily for regulated users. Those people have to write down every single phone call they make that have to have every email tracked and whatever. I guess we're explaining intelligent speaker now, when they walk into a conference room, how do we know that Tom Arbuthnot said that? And not Michael Tressler because Tom is a regulated user. We don't care about Michael, but that's okay. And we need a transcript. We have to have a transcript of the meeting for legal reasons. What intelligent speaker does is, and I'm skipping a lot of steps here, Tom, the regulated user, goes into his Teams client, reads a paragraph, and it makes a biometric voice print. And then, if he's invited properly to the meeting, he walks into the conference room, Tom starts speaking, and the transcript doesn't say, a person or speaker 1 in conference room A said this, it says Tom Arbuthnot in conference room A said that. Our regulated users... all his communications or her communications are still tracked. So that's Intelligent Speaker. Where that leads to with Copilot and all that Tom was alluding to is... With that transcript now, that is what Copilot uses and Intelligent Meeting Recap can use to give you a summary of, Hey, these are the notes from the meeting. These are tasks. And instead of saying somebody said, I'll take it. I'll be responsible for the garbage committee. It's Tom Arbuthnot, said he'd volunteer for the garbage committee hypothetical party. I'm helping run an Oktoberfest right now. So that's just one of those tasks that no one wants to do. But we have people, Michael volunteers to be on the beer drinking committee, as opposed to a user volunteered to be on the beer drinking committee. So that provides real power. And then the team's premium intelligent meeting recap can summarize all that know exactly when in the what in the conference room when Tom spoke or when Michael spoke in the conference room, you always know the remote users because they have their own identity in Teams. So it knows where it came from in the conference room is the problem.
Tom Arbuthnot:That's awesome. You've got eyes on what Jabra are doing. Is there anything you can share that you're particularly excited about either on the Android side or on the Windows side? I've, I wanted to dig into the Microsoft Android potentially being interesting. You might be the first guys to that as well.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, so at Enterprise Connect, there was an announcement that Microsoft is going to offer an Android for Teams devices. and that's all I know, honestly. Internally, I haven't even seen a test build, so I don't know what all it entails. I can only repeat the press release. Not legally, it's just, that's all I know. Yeah. it's early days. we don't expect to see it. Again, I'm not in engineering, so don't hold me to any of these dates, but first half of next year, 2024, is where I think it's going to land hopefully sooner than later, but it's out of our hands at job or it's Microsoft writing the Android. And when are they going to be ready to support it? There's a whole support channel and docs articles and the whole thing when Microsoft introduces essentially a brand new operating system, which it is, because it's not Windows. It's not, the Android for duo, the phone. It's an Android for devices. It's going to be a fresh build, a new tree, a new fork.
Tom Arbuthnot:I think that's going to be really interesting because I've definitely heard customers that want someone to be accountable for the Android and they ideally want Microsoft to be accountable for the Android.
Michael Tressler:So great. Microsoft creates the Android. What problem does that solve? A couple, one, does your security department, Tom at Empowering.Cloud, when you go to your security department, when someone says I have a product, the same product. One is from a company named Jabra who released their first operating system one month ago, or option B is a product from a company that released their first operating system 45 years ago.
Tom Arbuthnot:I have good friends at Jabra. So I trust Jabra inherently, if I was not me, might be tempted to say, I probably would sign off on Microsoft sooner.
Michael Tressler:And at Enterprise Connect when that came out, Eric Taylor said he had a conversation and a customer was like, yeah, we're not interested in Android. And he said. What if Microsoft wrote the Android? They're like, Oh, keep talking. Like you tell, because for that exact reason, there's fragmentation. and all of them do a great job. But Neat writes their own Android. Logitech writes their own Android AudioCodes write their own Android, Bose is responsible for their own Android. Poly is responsible for their own Android. I don't want to list them all off. I'm going to forget some. Crestron's got a bar coming out.
Tom Arbuthnot:14. We're up to 14,
Michael Tressler:Which one am I missing? Sorry. Apologies. It's not personal, who I've missed. Anyway, so you've got all these different Androids, all with different features, all at different versions. And Tom, you've done a great job initially explaining what the Android life cycle actually meant that, Hey, devices on Android 9, you have two years of support. Even if the hardware vendor says we'll give you three years of support. The Android life cycle, you tracked it down really well.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah, it took a bit of tracking down, so obviously Microsoft will only support the major versions of Android for so long connecting to Microsoft 365. So they give public timelines on Docs, and it's up to the OEMs to keep upgrading the Android, but they can only upgrade as far as... The chipset they chose to purchase and the Android open source project supporting that chipset. So it's a very convoluted three way conversation between which chipset you chose, which major Android is supported do, you want to pay to test the major Android upgrade, all that kind of stuff. And unfortunately a lot of people in the AV space or the room space. Just assume I'm buying a device. Therefore, I've got three to five years out of it, which depending on when in the life cycle, you buy it could be true or not. Microsoft will do reasonable endeavor support after that end of support date, but we haven't seen a device go through that yet. So we'll see what that looks like.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, they've extended it. And then all the vendors to their glory have pushed more Android updates. So they, if they initially launched on Android 8, they upgraded to 9, maybe to 10 which extends the life cycle for
Tom Arbuthnot:Definitely. Every time they jump the major, if they go into the next kind of date band for support. So as long as you're working with an OEM that is committed to updating and puts in decent chip sets, you're going to get longer life.
Michael Tressler:And you have new enough equipment that can support it. So if you bought your Poly phone four years ago, or two years ago, you probably,
Tom Arbuthnot:This is the danger. You need to know what you're doing though. We do a lot of research on this to like, make sure you know when in the life cycle you're buying a device. And it's hard sometimes cause you're buying from another DISTI who might not know that intricate detail as well. So it's important to be informed, but yeah, it's interesting to see. You guys being one of the first people potentially to have that Microsoft Android OS, and how that impacts the market.
Michael Tressler:Yep. And I've heard two and a half other vendors, just, reading the tea leaves that are interested in this as well. There's no requirement today to go there. So I know Logi has, and I'm not saying Logi isn't one of the two and a half. Okay. Just, I'm not giving any secrets away. but Logi has done a great job promoting CollabOS, their Android version as a competitive advantage.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. And like you said Microsoft, they're not forcing people at all. If you're an OEM who wants to manage your own Android, absolutely. That's going to be fully supported. It's just an option.
Michael Tressler:Logi wants to move forward. look, Microsoft Android doesn't let us do these four things, which our customers love. They can stay CollabOS and they've been around long enough that they've had enough security discussions that, that people now, Hey, they've been doing it, what, four years, three years, and they have enough in market that they may just stay CollabOS, but there are other ones like Jabra. We're a headset and camera company, we're not an operating system company. We had to spin up an operating system team for this. Boy, it'd be nice if we could take some of those people and put them on things that provide more value directly to us and our customers. We will still need some because we have to write drivers to our camera, drivers to our speakers and microphones. We still have to do some core OS work, but at that point, we basically support drivers and Microsoft supports all the other stuff.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. It's interesting. Definitely.
Michael Tressler:The other fun thing that hopefully this solves, to an extent, is that, when Android features get released, it's often Neat and Yealink will have this feature on October 3rd, coming to Logitech November 3rd, coming to Poly on November 12th. What is with all these delays? And that's because those will require firmware and OS updates from the vendors and some in their development life cycle are earlier, based on a given feature and some are a little later. Some like Logitech always want to test the feature first and then wrap it into a firmware. So Logitech is always a little later, but they believe that provides for a more stable customer experience. So in this scenario, when Microsoft updates the Android, it'll have all the features at the OS level needed. And if we at Jabra have our drivers ready, if we need to update our drivers for that feature, we only have to worry about the driver's features. So the hope is, most OEMs, if they most go with Microsoft Android, will have features on the same day. Because you never see on Teams Rooms Windows. Hey, Lenovo gets it on this date. Yealink gets it on that day. Polly get that on the other day. Logitech gets it on, two weeks later. It's Hey, we're pushing in the next three weeks. Everybody gets it.
Tom Arbuthnot:Yeah. It'd be nice to see that uniformity. Definitely. I think that the security one is a big one as well. We'll see whether other OEMs follow or as you say whether they'd like that independence of their own Android OS.
Michael Tressler:And then we'll see if what, if there's one holdout, Microsoft may finally go, okay, you're the one. We'll give you, we'll give you a year or two years or whatever. You're causing us more heartache. Figure out how to do your cool stuff on our build.
Tom Arbuthnot:Awesome. I want to wrap this up by saying on the pod, thank you for everything you're doing for the community as well. And your Empowering.Cloud videos have been some of the top watched ones all your voice ones. So I really appreciate it.
Michael Tressler:Yeah, it goes back to my Skype Voice days, and I wanted to learn it myself how to do it. I did four videos on how to connect Teams to the PSTN. If you don't know what PSTN is, so you can order a pizza from your Teams client. That's the way to do it. And Tom, we didn't talk about poetry or philosophy. Like you said, we would.
Tom Arbuthnot:I know we're going to have to do a part two. We were planning on the pod before, and we were going to do a poetry and philosophy special, but we've ended up talking about, IT and android. So maybe yeah, More
Michael Tressler:life, the universe and everything, a little less vogue on poetry.
Tom Arbuthnot:Next pod though, next pod. You'll have to come back.
Michael Tressler:Thanks Tom. This was fun. It's always great seeing you and look forward to seeing you soon, whenever the next time is going to be.
Tom Arbuthnot:Appreciate it. Cheers, Michael.