Microsoft Teams Update - February 2024

Hi, welcome. This is the audio version of my Microsoft Teams monthly updates. If you want the full deck and visuals and everything else, you can go and see over at empowering. cloud. But otherwise hope you enjoy the audio version. Microsoft Teams Monthly Update, February 2024. Many thanks to Luware, this month's benefactor, for their support of everything we do at Empowering Cloud. They have a great Certified Contact Center solution and Certified Recording solution. And I'll be doing a webinar with Luware in March all around security and keeping your data secure in the cloud, so look out for that. Quite a bit to talk about this month. We're pre Enterprise Connect. Enterprise Connect is the end of March, and often a lot of news gets held up for Enterprise Connect, and there'll definitely be some announcements there we can talk about. I'll be there too. But in the meantime, we have had some good announcements. So we've got some Apple Vision Pro. We've got new shared calling information, new devices, public preview of backup and some Android date changes. So let's dive in. First off on empowering cloud, we've got some new briefings. We've got some new podcasts, got a really big reaction from Mark's podcast, going through Microsoft Teams rooms in a digital global workplace. That was really, really great. He told us about his journey and his MTR journey at BP. And also Zach's Complex Voice podcast has been really interesting as well, as well as some frontline worker information there. And also linked in the deck and below are my videos from ISE. A little bit less news at ISE this year than last year, but we still got some new announcements, new camera from AudioCodes. We did a demo of the Neat Center. We'll talk to Jabra about MDEP, which is obviously really interesting and will be coming later this year, and some new cameras from Crestron and Pexip News as well. So if you're interested in devices, check out those ISE videos there. This month we got Teams and other Microsoft apps on the Apple Vision Pro. This was particularly interesting because this was not just the iPad apps that have been enabled for Apple Vision Pro. Microsoft have actually put some development effort in here to have specific apps for the Apple Vision Pro. Some other big providers have kind of snubbed the Vision Pro a little bit. So people like Netflix, which is really interesting. But Microsoft getting in there and probably seeing it as part of their VR, XR, Augmented Reality strategy. So they've got Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Loop all on the Vision Pro. Microsoft Mesh, which is Microsoft's 3D virtual worlds for meetings, is coming later this year. Mesh is just GA'd, but at the moment Mesh is primarily for the MetaQuest headset or keyboard and mouse. And there's a couple of links there to some blogs about the announcement. I haven't had hands on yet, hoping that there might be a Vision Pro somewhere around when we're out in Summit next month. But there's a demo there from Jeremy Dalton of how Teams looks inside the Vision Pro. I think this is a pretty niche use case. It's a fairly expensive headset, obviously, but interesting to see Microsoft putting some investment into that as well. Shared calling. We talked about this last month recently announced, but now it is also in the team's admin center. So this is a big thing for lots of customers who prefer doing administration through TAC. And a lot of those smaller customers that will be TAC first will definitely be discovering shared calling now. You can see there, you can completely set up your shared calling in the team's admin center. I had a conversation with Kevin Peters about shared calling and what it is and how it works and what's in it for operators. Link in the slide there, if you're interested. And also on our empowering cloud research, we've started collecting who's supporting shared calling. So any operator connect can choose to support it. But not all of them are at the moment. I think we're up to about 20 at the moment. But I'm looking to confirm with all of them. So if you take a look at the list or if you are an operator and you are supporting it let me know and we'll update the research. Improvements in Copilot for Teams. Microsoft have added some additional features to the Copilot experience in Teams. So it gives you some better prompting, it has your chat history, which is a really big one for me, being able to go back and see the previous chats you've had, and also gives you access to a library of prompts via the Copilot Lab. This is definitely an improved experience. It's pretty good. Also, you can see Copilot is starting to be put into windows. This is on the insider build. So it's still relatively early, but the idea is there'll be a default persistent sidebar there for your Copilot experience. And if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot, then that will give you access to those Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities as well. So you can see here, Microsoft are trying to present Copilot on all these different surfaces to see where people will engage with it best. Do you engage with it in Windows? Do you engage with it in Teams? Do you engage with it inside of apps? And at the moment, the answer is any and all of the above. The Teams 2. 1 cutover is very near, so Microsoft will automatically switch everybody over to the new Teams 2. 31st, so not that long. If at enterprise you want to get ahead of this and you want to push out the new Teams client at scale, Microsoft have released a new bulk deployment tool. So you can deploy to many clients called Teams Bootstrapper, which gives me reminiscence of the Skype for Business Bootstrapper. And basically this will go and grab the latest Teams client and install it on those machines proactively. There's a really good blog there from Jogan Nilsson around how it works and how you can use it with PowerShell as well. One here for those considering Teams Premium or already on Teams Premium. Microsoft have created a specific adoption site for Microsoft Teams Premium. So it has details about the features, about how to deploy it, best practices, Premium is something you're going to see Microsoft continuing to add features to and push this year. I'm keeping a close eye on it. It feels like almost a third of features announced now are, this is premium or this has a premium option. So this premium capability will continue to grow. And if you're deploying Teams Premium, that site gives you some good content and recommendations around getting the most out of that investment. Moving a bit more to Microsoft 365, we saw Microsoft 365 Backup public preview this month. So Backup is currently in preview and will be rolling out to customers early 2024 as a GA. Microsoft say that one of the differentiates is lightning fast restorability and data is all kept in native format. It's all within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. List price is 15 cents per gigabyte per month. At the OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange, but Teams is coming as well. If you're interested, there's a couple of links there about how it works and how the pricing model works. Nice new feature for Android devices, something I know some people have been waiting for. You can now define a maintenance window for when your updates happen. So this is for Microsoft Teams rooms on Android, but also phone and panels. You can go in, you can set a configuration profile. You can define the times and dates of when you want that window to be. So you can do your out of hours, and that will restrict those updates and reboots to the out of hours. So nice little option there. Also on the Android front, we saw date extensions for certification for Android 9 and Android 10. As a reminder, Microsoft gives dates for certification for major versions of Android, and that's how long the device is supported in combination with the OEM and Microsoft. Once you fall out of those dates, you've got two years, kind of, Microsoft reasonable endeavors of support as well. So first off, we saw the Teams IP phone dates extended for audio codes and poly, who are on Android 9. The dates are extended to 30th of October. And I know both Polly and audio codes are working on Android updates with Microsoft at the moment, so there'll be a new OS version pushed out and that will extend the support dates again based on that new version of Android. No extensions for the Crestron IP phones there. And for Android 10 based devices, the certifications have extended to 3rd of September 2025. So again, you will currently have till September 3rd 2025 for the mainstream certified day and then plus two years of the kind of reasonable endeavors continuing to upgrade those devices New certified hardware. We saw a lot of hardware announcements at ISE, but still pending certification. So we've got the Crestron Android Bar pending certification, the new Crestron One Beyond pending certification, some new stuff from AudioCodes pending as well. But the Teams AVA VB350 That's a USB peripheral bar from Ava. The Panasonic Press IT 360 or Press It 360. I'm not sure. That's interesting because that got certified as a Windows peripheral and that is a 360 camera. So that's certified to plug into any Windows MTR and it's doing processing of the 360 on the camera. So it gives various layout options. It will feed. To the MTR as a single feed, or it could be used as a BYOD device So now you've got a 360 camera as a peripheral for any Windows MTR. You've got the Logi Sights as a 360 along with their bar. And coming soon you've got the Neat 360 as well. it's going to be interesting to compare those 360 cameras and their experience. Also, AudioCode's got some new bundles certified, the RXB200, B20 and B40. And those are MTR OA bundles. Also on the devices front, Pexip announced they're bringing a Teams like experience to CVI. I spoke to Pexip at ISE. They've got some really great technology. And what they're doing here is they're emulating and integrating with some of the team's experience on the standards based video end. So what Pexip are doing with their Cloud Video Interop solution, which is certified to interrupt with Microsoft Teams, is allowing standard based rooms to join a Microsoft Teams meeting. But now they're bringing in the raised hand indicator. They're bringing in transcription and recording notifications, guests in lobby, and even when PowerPoint Live is used, that doesn't translate through to Cloud Video Interrupt yet. But it will ping you to say, look, you're going to need to join on a team's client or the remote person is going to need to do screen share. That's a good demo there. YouTube video. And that is coming in Q1. So looking forward to testing that out. Operator Connect, no huge changes this month. We got some new countries. Interesting to see cool tower coming into the UK there. Telstra added some new countries, a brand new country to the whole of OperatorConnect Bolivia coming in from LoopUp. We also got two new providers, ODEO Business and Beztec International Netherlands and Israel respectively. And as I said earlier in the briefing, we've started tracking which of the Operator Connect providers are providing shared calling. So we're early on that research, but if you've got any providers you know are or are not supporting shared calling, we're going to keep populating that, so I appreciate everybody's support and information there. Onto events. Some good things coming in March. We've got the Teams Phone Summit from Microsoft, which is a multi day, multi session event all around Teams Phone. That looks really, really good. For Fireside Chat, I'm actually going to be in Redmond in the US. So planning to pull in some MVPs and maybe some Microsoft people into the Fireside Chat. Looking forward to that. And then for in person, I'm speaking on the 27th in London at an Audio Codes event. If you're around. It'd be great to see you there. We also have the London news group, 7th of March at Poly. Looking forward to that with Mo as a special guest doing a session. Enterprise Connect is just around the corner as well. Are we doing a special session on the Monday that is everything you need to know on Microsoft Teams from a service owner perspective. And that's a four hour training session. So we're going to go over everything a service owner needs to know, including kind of third party, management, best practice, reporting, all those considerations. And then April looking a bit further out. We've got CommsVNext. That's always great. Really great MVP community driven event. Seen lots of sponsors and lots of people are already locked into that. I know Jimmy's going to be there. Lots of other MVPs are going to be there. So check that one out and definitely recommend that one. On the webinar front, we've got three coming up. So I've got Pure IP Coffee Club, which can be really interesting. That's all around Copilot and Teams Voice with Chris Wheeler and Ian Guest at Pure IP. AVI SPL, we've got a session on the power of collaboration and Microsoft AI with Microsoft Teams. And also March, we've got how to keep your custom data secure and safe in the cloud with Luware. It would be great to see you on some of these webinars. They are all supporters of everything we're doing in Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate their support. So if those topics are interesting to you, I really appreciate you registering for those should be good. We keep the chat going. We keep them interactive. So hopefully really good sessions there. So that's it for February. Thanks again to Luware for their support of Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate it. Some interesting news this month. Next month with Enterprise Connect coming, we will have a massive amount of news. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, if you've got any questions, comments or feedback, do let me know. Thanks a lot.