Microsoft Teams Update January 2024

Welcome to the teens insider podcast. We're trying something new this week. Every month I put a monthly update out on empowering cloud with all the Microsoft teams and Microsoft 365 news in under 15 minutes. and we've had a few requests for just an audio podcast version of that same update. So this is the update you can go and grab the video and the deck@empowering.cloud completely free. But for those of you that prefer audio when you're on the move, here's the same update. Audio only. Let us know if this is good for you, let us know what you think about putting this on the podcast feed. Thanks a lot. Microsoft Teams monthly update January 2024. We're here. We're in the new year. Hope you had a good break and wishing you a great happy new year, if we're still doing that. Lots of news already, even though it's just the start of 2024. We got some big news on Copilot, a new Teams phone SKU, which definitely doesn't happen every day, and some features coming to Teams and a few Operator Connect changes. Many thanks to Pure IP, this month's sponsor. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. I've worked with and for PureIP for over a decade, great company, one of the Operator Connect providers, one of the first and 50 countries on Operator Connect as well, but also direct routing as a service and managed SBC and I'll be doing some events with them, which we'll cover in the events section. Latest on Empowering Cloud, we've got a great briefing from Zach around taking charge of your Microsoft Teams phone experience. So really good short briefing and worth checking out. Zach's been smashing out some really good content lately for the community. On the podcast front, I had a great conversation with Damian all around real world Teams phone migration. So porting, dealing with the pace of change, operational models, really good conversation worth checking out too. On the product briefings ramp, we went through the Edge 8000 SBC series from Ribbon comparing those to the 1K, 2Ks, if you go back that far, I've deployed lots of those where those Edge devices sit and why you still often need an Edge device in a Teams phone deployment. BYOD versus Microsoft Teams rooms. It feels like this is an interesting debate. Now, Microsoft are slightly blessing BYOD with some specific use cases. That's Graham from Neat. And we went through some of the things Microsoft are doing in BYOD and how it compares to the still premium Teams room experience. And there's a blog there as well worth checking out LeapXpert, they have an add on for Microsoft Teams where you can enable your phone number, so your Operator Connect, your DR, or even your Microsoft Calling Plan phone number for WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat, etc. And they brought that all into Microsoft Teams as a native experience. So if that's of interest for you, particularly if you're in the compliancy space, then check out that blog.. We have to start with the co pilot for Microsoft 365 news.

Big,

Big news dropping at a completely random time. It feels like the AI team inside of Microsoft are just running to their own pace. So now co pilot for Microsoft 365 is open to basically all user accounts. So it's open to business plans. So business standard, business premium and e plans. and now there's no seat minimum as well. So previously you had to be on an M365 plan, not an E, like E plan, like an E3 or an E5 and you had to buy a minimum of 300 seats. All of that has gone now. You can buy from one seat and up. You can see there it's on the marketplace. That's on the Empowering Cloud tenant. I've added a seat to my production. So previously I worked with some early access customers and the MVPs kindly had a shared tenant we could test out with. But I'm really excited now to have hands on my production. account so I can give you some real world experience and feedback. And already it's really interesting using Copilot daily to see what works well, what needs a bit of work. So expect more content and perspective around that in the coming months. And if you've got any questions around copilot, feel free to ping me. I'm happy to test things and see what works and what doesn't work as well. But this is big for Microsoft and for customers. It means that you can buy just one seat. It is an annual commit or a three year commit. So you can't do it monthly. You have to buy at least one seat annually, but it's now open for those E plans, which is a big unlock and small business, which is a big unlock. And we've got it coming for Edu and coming for F licenses, the frontline worker licenses as well. More Copilot news, this time on the consumer side. So Microsoft launched Copilot Pro. Which is 20 per user per month, but this is specifically for Microsoft 365, personal and family. So this is a consumer use case, not a business use case. And you see a quick comparison chart there in the deck. It's very similar to Copilot for Microsoft 365 in terms of some of the functionality, but specifically doesn't include Microsoft Teams. So Teams free. can't get copilots also doesn't have obviously the graph capabilities or the enterprise capabilities in terms of data grounding. So it's more like a personal AI assistant, but with the benefits of having integration into the office apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera. I think this is a pretty specialist use case. It takes a very specific consumer to want to pay 20 per user per month for an AI add on. But it's competing with that chat GPT paid 20, except you're getting it in Microsoft office, which for some people will be a real benefit. Also Microsoft launched dedicated co pilot apps for iOS and Android. Right now, those are only for consumer accounts, so you can't yet sign in your M365 account onto those mobile apps. I suspect that will be coming. Last bit of Co Pilot news and I promise we'll stop talking about Co Pilot for a minute. Co Pilot for Microsoft 365 users will now be able to get Intelligent Meeting Recap in that single SKU. So previously this was part of Teams Premium, you got Intelligent Meeting Recap in Teams Premium. So if you wanted that and Co Pilot you had to log both SKUs. Now, if you buy the SKU, you get Intelligent Meeting Recap, which I think just makes sense, right? It's keeping all the core AI capabilities for Microsoft 365 in one SKU. You can still buy Teams Premium without Copilot and you still get Intelligent Meeting Recap there. But if you are a Copilot user, then you can get that bundled in now. And that's nice to see. It's interesting, Intelligent Meeting Recap summaries are different to the Copilot summaries. So it's interesting to compare and contrast those as well. That's rolling out now. If you've got co pilot for Microsoft 365, you should be seeing that either now or very soon. Let's talk Teams Phone. So Teams Phone got a new SKU. This really doesn't happen every other day. And this is a specific SKU for frontline workers. So it's 4 per user per month, rather than the standard 8 per user per month. And it's an attach onto the F1 and the F3, the frontline worker licenses. So these are people working in frontline roles, retail roles typically smaller screen or web user devices but they have the opportunity to use Teams phone and this commercially aligns it much better to those use cases where the frontline worker SKUs are a lot cheaper, so adding on Teams phone is cheaper too. I think this will be interesting because if you think about this, you could then stack on shared calling. So you don't need a DDI per user or a calling plan per user as well, potentially. If you think about use cases here, it could be retail. It could be phones on counters. It could be dedicated devices on Android. For example, I got Kevin Peters on for a quick chat around this. He's the director of business strategy for teams phone. And we got into some of the use cases and some of the reasoning for that. So if you're in the frontline worker space or the partner space, definitely worth checking out. That should unlock some interesting opportunities around frontline worker. This is a niche use case, but nice to see Microsoft tidying up the experience here. So with Microsoft Teams, we have the Teams free consumer version of Teams. That's the one on the left there. And then we have the Microsoft Teams. Work and education of the main Microsoft Teams that nearly everybody uses on the right. And right now, if you schedule a meeting from your commercial account, your business account, free users can't join that meeting via the free client. They can join via the web app, but it's a bit of a weird experience if they're, for example, an interview scenario. So a business sends a Teams link for interview. The individual has Windows, they're signed into Windows with their Microsoft account. So they have Teams free. They expect to join the meeting with Teams because they don't know it's Teams free. They think it's all Teams, obviously, as you would, but they can't join the meeting through that free client. This will unblock that so the teams free client will be able to join commercial meetings and vice versa that you could set up a meeting in teams free and a commercial client could join. I don't think this is super heavily used unblocks a real niggle in user experience where people just don't understand why it's all Microsoft Teams. Surely I should be able to connect between the two. It will be the consumer accounts joining the business meetings first, and then the reverse will be true. And then there'll be some policies in the Teams admin center, so you can choose to block that if you prefer. Microsoft making some improvements to the Teams invite. If you think about this as an interface, this is something that, millions of people use every day, potentially 320 million monthly active users. So making this clear and easy is super important for Microsoft. So they've moved some formatting around, they've created dedicated sections. So you can better understand what's going on, clear help link, bigger meeting join link. And I think it looks a lot tidier. It's nice to see it all tidied up. And that's rolling out from around February time. Teams Android Auto. Nice to see this. This has been a long time coming. It was announced early last year at Google IO. Not sure why it's taken so long, but it's coming in February. And this is a feature equivalency to what we have already today on Apple CarPlay, a full Teams client experience. Click to join the meeting, click to call, see who's in the call, call controls, those kinds of things. So nice to see that leveling up for those that use Android auto Operator connect even though it's the start of the year. We had some news So two more operators for india since last month's update. They're now three operators in india, which is a really big deal We're up to 87 providers in total 85 countries covered On the industry news from Momentum, who recently acquired G12, have also acquired Horizon Telecom in the Netherlands, so some further consolidation there. And NuWave have got NTT calling plans fully automated into their iPilot solution, which is their dashboard solution for Operator Connect and also adding on other solutions. And they've added in shared calling support and Teams Phone Mobile provisioning for those operators that have Teams Phone Mobile. Shared calling is a really interesting one. I'm not seeing many operator connect operators want to support shared calling. We're keeping a close eye on that. I'm hoping to add it into our research comparison to confirm, but right now it's very low numbers of operators connect providers who are actually providing shared calling. They all can technically if they want to, but they have to decide on an operator by operator base if they want to support it. If you want to keep up with all the changes, Telenix also added some countries this month you can check those out on the link there that takes you through to our Power BI report, which has all the details on the operators, what countries they support, capabilities, those kind of things. Kevin on our team puts that together. So if you've got any feedback, we'd love to hear it. Onto events, we are ramping up into event season now. So first in person will be ISE at the end of the month. Really excited for that. I've got a packed schedule going around the stands. So look out for lots of videos on my LinkedIn about what's going on. Also audio codes. They're showing their new camera, which you can see on the bottom left there. So if you want to check out their latest PTZ camera, go and see those guys. On the online front teams rooms tech talk is back. So Jimmy and Michelle doing a really good job there. And that's that one on the 22nd is going to be a great one to check that out. Got some webinars coming up, which I'll get into. We've also got Michelle for teams fireside chat. We had Connie Walsh earlier in the month and had 290 people turn up to that for her talking about Teams frontline worker and co pilot demos. She was great. Michelle's awesome. So I have no doubt he'll bring a lot of value to that session. Come and check that out. We've always got the Microsoft Teams, Ask Us Anything. Those are great as well. And looking forward to Teams Nation, which is back 21st of Feb. That's an online free event. On the webinar front pure ip, I'm doing two webinars with, this month we're going into accelerating adoption of teams voice and that's with Alistair who runs their pro services team. He's really knowledgeable, so we're gonna try and get into what are the key blockers that slow teams phone down, and how do we speed that up and get the migration going With Landis, we're doing a live deployment of Landis Contact Center, so you can see how that works end to end. And they've recently added some AI capabilities, so we'll be checking that out as well. Then in February, Pure IP again, we're going to talk about Copilot and Teams Phone. Now everybody has access to Copilot and you can add it one seat at a time. It's really interesting to look at the value of bringing Copilot and Teams Phone together. AVI SPL. I've got a Microsoft special guest for converged communications. 2024 again, looking at meetings, voice and AI. And for Luware, we've got a specific deep dive on Nimbus and security. in particular have a real focus on security minded customers. And we'll look at what's the difference between Nimbus and other solutions that might make you consider them if you have particular security requirements, all those events are available on events. empowering. cloud, and those sponsors really help us do everything we do here, so I really appreciate you coming to those events to get some value and supporting the events because these are the sponsors that make all this possible. Thanks to them. So that's it for this month. Thanks again to Pure IP for their support. Lots of co pilot news. I'm surprised so early in the year. We got that unlock of co pilot for everybody. That's exciting. New team's phone worker SKU is very exciting as well. If you're at ISE, let me know. It'd be great to say hello. I'll be there for a few days. So that'll be great. And look out on LinkedIn for lots of updates from ISE. And next month we'll have the roundup of all the news. Thanks very much.