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Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is my monthly update for April. Just back from enterprise connect, 20 minutes of everything you need to know. If you want to see the full video and grab the slide deck and the show notes and links head over to empowering.cloud. Thanks a lot.

Tom Arbuthnot 0:17

Microsoft Teams Monthly Update, April 2024. It's a week after Enterprise Connect and we had lots of news over there. I had a really good time at the show. So I'm going to take you through all the news that dropped Enterprise Connect. Many thanks to Landis who are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. I caught up with the Landis team over at Enterprise Connect and we learned about their new AI capabilities. Their regional data center for the EU and also their new web chat capabilities. So do check out that video to learn more about Landis and their contact center. Lots going on in Empowering Cloud this month. We got an introduction to Copilot dashboard briefing that's been really popular. Some new podcasts around Teams media collection and how that can be used in different ways for Uh, Product Briefing with dedicated SBCs for Teams and of course, some Enterprise Connect videos there, including the Landis one that will give you more details about their new contact center capabilities. So this was always going to be a busy monthly update because of all the Enterprise Connect news, but on the 1st of April, we also got announced that Microsoft are unbundling Teams from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft 365 slash Office 365 globally. So previously they had announced that they were going to do this in the EU. They announced it in August last year and it happened in October last year. And this was due to pressure because the EU's executive arm, opened an antitrust investigation against Microsoft. that was pushed by Slack reporting them in 2020. And this is a really big deal for Microsoft. The potential fines, if you're found guilty of antitrust breaches, can be up to as much as 10 percent of your global annual turnover. But this is a real significant potential fines here. In October last year, Microsoft gave EU customers the option to buy Microsoft 365 without Teams. And in fact, they have to buy Microsoft 365 without Teams if they're enterprise and then add that on And now the same thing's happening worldwide. So what does this mean for customers? Microsoft announced it as globally consistent licensing helps ensure clarity for customers and streamline decision making and negotiation. So now the rules are the same all around the world, starting April the 1st, so this month, customers can continue with their existing licensing model if they want, they can renew, or they can switch to this new model. So for existing customers, the existing tenants, they can continue to add the traditional licenses that include Microsoft 365 and Teams, but for new Microsoft 365 customers that are going to enterprise plans, so E1, ME5, there will no longer be a capability to buy that with Teams bundled. They'll have to buy it without Teams and then add on Teams with an additional license. What does that look like? So again, this is E plans for net new customers. So not existing customers, they will have to buy the E1, E3 or E5 or ME3, ME5 with the no Teams, and that's a little bit discounted. But then if they want Teams, they will have to add on the new Microsoft Teams Enterprise SKU. So that SKU is only an add on to Microsoft 365. You can't buy Teams standalone with that SKU. $5.25. And that is more than the equivalent discount for those prices. So net, this is a price increase where you have to buy both the E1, E3, E5, and the Teams Enterprise SKU. And you can see below on the table there, that's the EU pricing, similar model. In the EU, all the prices went down by 2 euros, but then you had to add the Teams EEA license for 5 euros. So now globally, both in Europe and the U. S. the model is the same. This is for net new customers going for e licenses. They will have to buy the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 bundle without Teams. And then they'll have to add on Teams on a per user per month basis. It's a little bit different for the business licenses. With the business licenses, just like in Europe, you can continue to stick with, even for new customers, the business basic standard or premium with Teams, or you can selectively choose to buy the business basic standard or premium without Teams. And you can see the respective discounts there. And the same thing for frontline worker suites. You can buy a slightly reduced cost suite without Teams instead of having Teams bundled. Microsoft Teams There's no add on for Teams here, you'd either buy the suite with Teams or the suite without Teams. So it's really only when you step up into those enterprise plans and you're a net new customer that you're going to be impacted by the need to buy the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 without Teams and then add Teams on as well. Interesting seeing Microsoft snaps this globally, I imagine they're still feeling some pressure from the EU so I've decided to expand this globally and also it does make it easier for customers who are negotiating contracts to have the same model inside and outside the EU. Of course, I'll be continuing to watch this space to see if anything else breaks. If you've got any thoughts or feedback on this, do let me know. Okay, on to the Enterprise Connect Microsoft Teams news. So first up, we have an increased Microsoft Teams phone service level agreement. So we went from four nines to five nines on Teams phone, Teams calling plans and audio conferencing. This is a financially backed SLA. If Microsoft dropped below this SLA, you can claim back credits from Microsoft based on the number of minutes over the SLA. Really nice to see this, just shows Microsoft's confidence in the platform now. Important to understand, this is Teams phone, so it's not the whole of Teams, so the SLA for Teams as a whole service hasn't changed. It's for Teams phone specifically, so the ability to make and receive phone calls, to join audio conferences, and if your Microsoft is your carrier, with calling plans, that is included in the SLA as well. saw some survival branch appliance enhancements. This is the box you can put on site with local PSTN breakout to have phone capability in the event the internet goes down or the service goes down. And they're adding user call transfer and forwarding. Also re routing of calls that were targeting at a call queue and auto attendant. so you can re route to a user on site, or you can re route to alternate call queue or auto attendant. And if you're using audio codes, they will provide SIP survivability for the Teams SIP gateway. So your devices will be primarily registered to the Teams SIP gateway, but they can be secondarily registered to the audio codes box on site, giving you SIP resiliency you can see below on the slide all the existing features that were there before as well. The big caveat around this is it does depend on your users or your phones being authenticated, and that's based on authentication token. And that token can last up to 24 hours, but it does renew every 24 hours. So you don't really know how long you've got on a per user or per phone basis before that token expires, which for survivability is a bit of a challenge. Maybe you've got a couple of hours, maybe you've got the full 24 hours, but you just don't know. So fine for minor internet outages, but still a challenge if you need to say the phones must stay up indefinitely in the event of an internet or service outage. Intelligent Call Recap is coming as part of Teams Premium. So this is just like Intelligent Meeting Recap. It's generating a summary based on the transcript of the session. But in this case, we can do it on Teams phone calls, but also internal VoIP calls as well. Providing, you've got Team Premium and you enable recording or transcription for those calls. And we also got Intelligent Meeting Recap coming to the Teams mobile app as well. So previously, we've had Intelligent Recap on the desktop clients. Now we're able to see those recaps right in the Teams mobile client, which is a nice touch. Really good to see some of these AI capabilities coming to Teams phone. These are things that you can only do in the cloud. If you're really on a true cloud platform, you would never do on a prem PBX. Four new operators coming to Teams Phone Mobile this year. AT& T, ODO in the Netherlands and Voda and VM02 in the UK. Interesting because we're having second operators now in market. So AT& T will be the second operator in the US. And we'll have potentially three in the UK, which starts to make it more competitive. AT& T, particularly big announcement, they are not going to charge any additional fee for Teams phone mobile capability. So you'll be able to buy an AT& T business contract or whatever the appropriate contracts are, and you will get Teams phone mobile capability at no extra cost. So far, all of the generally available operators have added a fee for that capability, somewhere between 4 and 10 depending on the user and the contract. I'm really excited to see how that hits in the market. And in the UK, similarly, it'll be interesting to see as we get both Voda and VMO2, having three operators in the UK, which will make it more competitive and probably raise the profile of Teams Phone Mobile as well. Talking of connectivity, in terms of Operator Connect, we are now up to 95 countries with a recent addition and 93 operators. See, we've got three new operators this month and a whole bunch of countries added there. As always, if you want to dig into what's changed this month and who's added countries and who's added capabilities, do check out the Power BI report. That's completely free to access. And Kevin always appreciates feedback on what you want to see in terms of comparing the operators there. Arguably one of the biggest announcements of Enterprise Connect is the new Queues app. So Microsoft are very careful about how they frame this. This is enabling customer engagement in Microsoft Teams. And they talk about Teams Member. The new Queues app coming to Microsoft Teams, arguably one of the biggest announcements at Enterprise Connect, and certainly something a lot of people were talking about. Microsoft is very careful about how they're positioning this. This is enabling customer engagement in Microsoft Teams. It's a call center like type capability, that they're not using call center or contact center as phrasing. They talk about team members and leads, rather than agents and supervisors. Microsoft Teams this will come as part of Teams Premium, but the users will also need the Teams phone license and they're essentially adding in capabilities around call queues and auto attendance. Comprehensive analytic dashboards, real time historical reporting, call monitor, barge, whisper, and takeover functionality, and the ability to delegate admin capabilities that allow leads to add or remove members from queues, change call handling flows etc. This got a lot of buzz and a lot of interest. I think it's really good value coming in as part of that premium per user bundle. Obviously, interestingly, it does start to step on the toes of the ecosystem contact center vendors at the very low end. But you've still got that ecosystem opportunity where you want to integrate into third party systems, do advanced routing, do advanced AI capabilities. So this will be coming summer 2024. There is a closed preview at the moment. If you want to find out more, check out the link below and you can apply to get into the preview as well. Voice isolation got announced as rolling out. So we've talked about this before. This is the capability to train teams on your voice. and have it isolate any noise from the call apart from your voice. So slightly different to the background noise reduction which is just programmatic. This is specifically trained on your voice. You do have to enroll your voice on the service and that voice enrollment is used for both the noise suppression, but it's also used to recognize you in the Teams Rooms meeting scenario where we're doing transcription and associating people with the transcription. So enrolling your users here, you get two benefits. You get the noise suppression with voice isolation and you get the voice recognition in the room scenario. People will be super interested around how the data is stored, how the enrollment works, etc. Voice profile data is stored as part of your user content in Office 365. And there's a link there that goes into detail about the enrollment process and where the data is stored and how long it's kept, etc. Really nice capability for users here, particularly in the working from anywhere type scenarios. The ability to have a really clear quality call despite background noise is really nice. This one didn't get much press at Enterprise Connect, but it did get announced at the same time. Microsoft are adding the codec AV1 in Microsoft Teams for screen sharing. This is desktop clients only to start. And the benefit here is much more clarity and higher frame rates and lower bandwidth usage. So if you look at the video here, as the screen is scrolling, you've got the traditional H. 264 we're using currently on one side, and you can see that's blurry as it's scrolling it, it moves and then it re renders. And you've got the AV1 and you have a nice clear screen, even as you're scrolling. And so higher frame rate at the exact same bandwidth usage. This was on the roadmap. It was put on the roadmap as optimized video settings for screen sharing, but we now know what that means is when you do that, it will flip into AV1 mode. Just desktop clients at the moment. Hopefully we'll see some of the other clients soon as well. Copilot and AI was very much the theme of Enterprise Connect. There was a lot of recapping about the capabilities. In terms of new announcements, there were a few. One of them was that the compose box in Teams, so when you've got Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can now add some custom prompting to help adjust what it's saying. So you can customize the prompt, say, Oh, I want this to be, a bit shorter, a bit longer, make it funny, et cetera, et cetera. So rather than just having those default prompts, you can tune that up. Nice to see. On the Teams devices front, we got some improvements for the Teams physical phones, new call handling capabilities, simpler multi call handling, improved UI, improved performance, and a big one is the ability to add local contacts, so via a CSV file upload, you can remotely assign PSDN specific contacts on those phones. And you can control the contact list as well. I know that's been a big ask for some customers to just be able to have some local phone cities. So I know that's been an ask for some customers to have local phone numbers who aren't Teams users, aren't contacts, just have them available in the directory on the phone. So nice to see that. Onto the rooms news. Biggest news for me was MDEP getting released to manufacturing. So this is the Microsoft Devices Ecosystem Platform, Microsoft's version of the Android OS, that they're then giving to the OEMs to run and make part of Teams Rooms. That will be Microsoft's Android OS and the Teams app on top. It's starting with Android 13 and Jabra are going to be the first OEM to have an MDEP device. It'll be their BBS, their video bar system upgraded to MDEP, which is really exciting. Yealink also announced they're going to be doing some devices as well. I know some customers like the idea of Microsoft being responsible for the full stack also, this potentially lets Microsoft build things in at the OS layer, things like manageability and control as well. I'll be keeping a close eye on this. I've got my VBS somewhere in the background. We'll be giving that an upgrade to MDEP as soon as we can, and I'll be reporting back on the experience. Other Teams Rooms updates, there was a big demo of Autopilot deploying a Teams Room system live on stage. It was a Surface Hub running in Microsoft Teams Rooms mode and that was deployed end to end in I think 13 minutes 40 seconds live on stage which was really cool to see. We also got some other feature announcements, so new abilities for remote attendees to toggle multi camera so they can choose on a Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows with multi camera. Do they want the audience view? Do they want the main view? Which is really exciting. Ultrasonic proximity join and QR code join. We've talked about those before, but those are coming soon. Requiring an additional meeting ID and passcode to join a Teams Rooms meeting. So this is the case where a Microsoft Teams Rooms is in a public area and you don't just want the ability to come up and click and join in the calendar. Even when you click and join, it will then prompt you for the ID and the passcode to make sure you know from your Outlook calendar you're due to be in that meeting. Direct Guest Join by ID. The direct guest joins the ability to join a WebEx meeting or a Zoom meeting. You'll now be able to click and input an ID rather than having to. You'll now be able to join a Zoom meeting from direct guest join via the ID, MTR, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android getting the home screen refresh that again we talked about last month, and the new Teams app that's now been rolled out to all the desktop users will also be coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. So no drastic changes there, but it should see an improved performance and it has all the capabilities that the Microsoft Teams Rooms app has today. You shouldn't see any differences in experience there. We've got speaker recognition coming for existing microphones that's coming into public preview. Previously we had to have those specific certified intelligent speakers that were really intelligent mics, but now any microphone will be able to do the speaker recognition capability. Remote attendees being able to toggle the layout in multi camera view we talked about. This is a new one. Laptop cameras coming in as an alternate camera. So you can see the rolling video here. This is a video of someone in a Teams meeting. One person is remote. The people in the meeting also have their laptops on, and their laptop cameras are being used as a secondary camera. So depending on whether the room system camera or the laptop camera has the better framing of their face, Microsoft Teams will dynamically adapt and choose which view is best for the remote attendee. Is it the individual in the room's laptop camera, or is it the room camera? I've seen some excitement around this on LinkedIn. People are excited by the potential to leverage those laptop cameras. We've already paid for them. They're right there, giving a almost perfect front view of the user, provided they've set their laptop up and lined it up nicely. Exciting to see continuing innovation on the service side with all the IntelliFrame capabilities. Bring your own devices and shared spaces news as well. We got reconfirmation that if a host has Teams Premium or Copilot license, then we'll be able to do speaker recognition attribution with BYOD devices. That's coming Q3 2024. And we know that BYOD rooms are now being discovered and can be added in bulk into the Pro Portal. Currently, you can get all those analytics about BYOD devices with no license from this month, when it goes GA, you will need a shared device license on those BYOD rooms to continue to see the analytics. And we got further demo of the bookable desk solutions that were announced at Ignite. Those are now going into private preview. I would expect to hear more about that later in the year as well. And we're seeing here that Microsoft are really bringing BYOD and Shared Spaces into the fold to complete the Teams story, whether you've got the best of experience with the Microsoft Teams Rooms, or whether you've got BYOD devices, you can still have that optimized Teams experience. You can see in the video here, someone's plugging into a BYOD scenario and they get the appropriate stage on the screen. They get their speaker notes on their laptop. So they don't get any of the Outlook or Teams toast popping up on the big screen as an example. On to events. Loads of events happening. It's really hitting event season at the moment. Looking forward to Teams Fireside Chat with Vandana Thomas. I'm actually going to be away that day, so Adam Ball from Cloud Revolution is standing in as host there and is going to take us all through those latest Teams phone mobile announcements, what they're doing with AI and those new operators. Of course, we've got the regular Microsoft Teams devices, Ask Us Anything. And as you saw, lots of news this month, so we'll be going deep there. Calling out a few in person events. I'll be at Denver at CommsVNext. I'm doing a Copilot session there. Really looking forward to that. We have the big Microsoft 365 conference coming out at the end of April. So looking forward to some new news there and coming up in May, we've of course got Fireside Chat. We've got Kevin Peters on the next one there. So we'll be going deep onto some of the Teams phone announcements. And we've got Microsoft Build coming up as well. More of a developer show. I'm sure there'll be lots of AI news there, which can inform what's going to be coming around Microsoft 365 as well. And shout out to Oak, one of our supporters. They have a couple of webinars coming up on their recording solution as well. So that's the news for this month. Thanks again to Landis for their support. Lots to talk about this month. Lots going on. Hope that kept you up to date. If you've got any questions, comments or feedback, do let me know. Otherwise, hope to see you all soon. Thanks a lot.