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Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is a special is my Microsoft Teams monthly update for July, 2024. To see the full video and to get the slide deck, head over to empowering.cloud. But for those who just prefer the audio is the foot update. Hope you enjoy it.

Tom Arbuthnot 0:18

Microsoft Teams monthly update July 2024. Many thanks to Logitech, this month's sponsor. Really appreciate their support of Empowering.Cloud. There's so much exciting stuff going on at Logitech at the moment. You've got the new Zone 305 dongle less headset that's certified for Teams without a dongle. That's a whole new certification. You've got the site adding smart switching. So that's their center of room camera. And MeetUp 2, a new BYOD device. It's a managed BYOD device. Lots to talk about this month. Normally July is a little bit quieter because it's the start of the new financial year for Microsoft. So the previous quarter is all about closing down sales and planning, but also towards the year Microsoft like to get some features out. So there are some new features and there's a brand new general availability release for Dynamics 365 Contact Center. We've also got some important changes coming up around teams, phone resource accounts. and Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android and Teams Phone Updates as well. so let's dive straight in. First up, I want to say a huge thank you to everybody for their support of Empowering.Cloud and what we're doing here. We've just had our second anniversary. We launched two years ago at Commsverse. Thank you so I'm so pleased with all the feedback we're getting. We're now up to over 100 subject matter expert briefings. We have lots of podcasts going. We've got this monthly update, of course. The fireside chat has been really well attended. The in person events. Huge thanks to the sponsors. They make all this possible. Really appreciate their support and their commitment to supporting community. And just huge thanks to everybody who's engaging, who's coming to the event, who's giving feedback. I really feel like we're getting strong momentum here around the community and the research, so thank you. This month on Empowering.Cloud, we've got some great content. We've got an expert briefing on Mesh. Mesh just announced some new capabilities, so definitely worth diving in there. On the podcast, we've had some great conversations around Teams Phone Mobile. and also a customer case study with Century Communities talking about their Teams Phone journey and how they're using Luware. On the product briefing side, we talked to Neat and Shure around their new ability for Neat devices to have Shure structured audio. Nice to see those capabilities coming through to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android We're just off the back of Commsverse 2024 in the UK. Huge event, really well attended. I think there were over 700 through the door. Sold out as usual. Amazing work from the organizers. Great work from all the speakers, everybody in the community who contributed to the event. Again, huge thanks to the sponsors. The events wouldn't be possible without the sponsors. I was excited to be involved in the keynote. We did a little customer panel around real world use cases of Copilot. I think we could have gone on a lot longer. My guests on the panel, I think we're going to turn that into a podcast, so look out for that soon. I also did lots of videos from the show catching up on all the latest news. Thanks again to everybody involved in the event. Onto the news. The EU has issued a statement of objections to Microsoft. This is around teams being integrated and bundled into Office 365 Microsoft 365. If you followed this story, this is originally Slack made a complaint to the EU Competition Commission saying it was unfair that teams was bundled with Office 365. This topic provokes a lot of debate. There's definitely some on the side of, yes, it is unfair that Microsoft have this massive power in office and they can leverage that. And maybe they have some private API capabilities that other vendors can't get into and can't do as tight as integration. And then you've got the other side of the coin where, people are saying that you've had OCS, Lync, Skype for Business, and now Teams. Teams is the natural successor. That was always part of a suite conversation. And how are big organizations supposed to compete if they're not allowed to innovate and add new features and add new value for their customers? This EU situation is what's caused Microsoft to unbundle Teams first in the EU and then globally. So net new customers to Office 365 or Microsoft 365, they have to buy the suite and then they buy Teams on top. The EU have said that's not enough, they need to do more, they haven't said exactly what they need to do. But Microsoft have been going back and forward with the EU trying to work out how they can keep everybody happy. If they can't come to an agreement, the EU could impose a fine of as much as 10 percent of the company's annual worldwide turnover. So not just turnover for the EU, but worldwide. So a really serious potential fine. I expect we'll see Microsoft go back and forth a bit more on this. I'll be keeping an eye on it. It's really interesting in the wider big tech conversation, certainly the EU are also talking about Apple and Apple will tightly integrating. Is it fair that they integrate the Apple Watch to the Apple ecosystem and no other smartwatch can do the same thing? So it's not just Microsoft, it's all big tech and integrated ecosystems are coming under fire at the moment. On to the new releases. Dynamics 365 Contact Center is now generally available. I talked about this last month as coming and now it is available. As a reminder, Dynamics 365 Contact Center, even though it has Dynamics in the name, doesn't take a tight dependency anymore on you being a Dynamics CRM customer. So you can bring your own preferred CRM or your own XRM or workflow management system. We got the pricing, so Dynamics 365 Contact Center per user per month is 110. And then there's a digital SKU and a voice SKU. The digital SKU is specifically the kind of chat and channels, and the voice SKU is specifically the voice. So the Dynamics 365 Contact Center, 110 has both those, or you can get the subset SKUs of digital and voice. In all scenarios where you're bringing voice or PSTN connectivity, you're bringing your own PST and your own session border controllers, you're connecting them to Azure communication services, so Azure direct routing. So you are going to incur PSTN costs and SBC and a CS costs as well. So to factor those in, Let's have a deeper look at those SKUs. So you can see the Dynamics 365 Contact Center is the top SKU and has all the capabilities. And then you have the digital SKU at 95, which is just the top SKU. chat email type capability. And then you have the voice queue, which is more focused on just the voice capability. So if you have agents that are only doing digital or only doing voice, you can save a little bit of money per month there as well. In terms of coverage, there's pretty good global availability. Not everywhere has voice yet, but there is some decent coverage. I'm talking to the Dynamics 365 Contact Center team at the moment and hopefully we'll do either a deep dive podcast or a Teams fireside chat where we'll get into Dynamics 365 Contact Center, how it comes together, how it fits, what it's targeted at. But certainly exciting to see Microsoft getting into this space. So now we've got Q's app on one end in Teams, we've got the whole Contact Center ecosystem around Teams, and we've got Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Microsoft Mechanics All vying for different areas of the market there. Next up, we've got Copilot for Sales. The Teams plugin is now rolling out. So as a reminder, Copilot for Sales is the Copilot aimed at salespeople to help them with their deals, with their opportunities, with their CRM. It tightly integrates with Dynamics 365, but also can be configured to connect to things like Salesforce. And the idea is it will be aware of your opportunities. It will help put data into your CRM. So the Teams plug in here will join live calls, it can read the transcript It can be queried in the call to suggest opportunities or help coach you through the call, and it can gather end of call information and bring that into the CRM help you log all that information and keep it up to date. Next up, we have Microsoft Teams bookable desks are now generally available. So as a reminder, this lets Teams users plug in and when they plug into devices, it will reserve the desk for them. So it will set this in their Outlook calendar. It will set their Teams presence to say where they are in the office. Really handy for the users and also for the IT team. They get all that data into the Microsoft Teams Pro Portal so they can start to get inventory and understanding of which desks are being used where. Interesting to see this story slowly coming together. We've got the bookable desks conversation, we've got the places conversation, Coming together in and around Microsoft Teams, so exciting to see that. Two links there if you want to find out more about how that works. Teams Webinar integration with HubSpot. This is using the new Microsoft Teams Webinar APIs in Graph. And what this allows you to do is connect up HubSpot and gather all the registration information and the attendance information, which helps you then automate through HubSpot all the various communications like pre webinar follow up, and it will log all that activity into the CRM as well. This is the kind of thing that marketing teams really want. These CRM are so key to streamline the webinar experience when they're looking to see who's engaged, how they engaged, all the follow up comms, so nice to see that. Public preview of a new optimized Teams VDI solution. This is on Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. Really great move forward for those using VDI. This is a new client side plug in. And it will download and install a new media engine called SlimCore. And what it's doing is replacing using WebRTC and using the same experiences in the Windows desktop client. So because it's getting more aligned to how Windows works, we're also getting some new features, so we're getting 1080p, 7x7, custom meeting backgrounds, computer sound while screen sharing. VDI is going to get much closer to the Windows fat desktop experience, which is great for VDI users. Microsoft No word yet on when this comes to, say, Citrix or VMware. It's starting with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. But if you are using VDI, definitely check this out. It'll be a big step forward for your users in terms of features and functionality and getting closer to that full desktop experience. An important change for Teams phone resource accounts. So if you're not familiar with these are the accounts you need to create auto attendances and call queues. These are essentially the accounts that align to those resources. Currently and historically, Teams admins could create those Teams Phone resource accounts directly. They didn't require any access to the rest of Microsoft 365. This is changing and now admins who create resource accounts will need to have user management permissions in Microsoft 365. So your Teams admins are either going to need user management access to Microsoft 365 to create them, or you're going to have to create a process where the Teams admins can request these resource accounts are created by the people of their own identity. This change will take effect on third quarter of 2024, so you've got a bit of time to plan here. Another really time sensitive one. This is the end of July. Microsoft will stop supporting legacy services for chat messaging, which initially doesn't sound that exciting. Microsoft But the older versions of Teams Rooms on Android and Teams Phone devices take a dependency on those legacy services. So you need to make sure your Teams Rooms on Android and your Teams Phone devices are fully up to date in terms of firmware and updates. This is one to tell a friend if you've got someone who looks after Teams Rooms on Android or Teams phones, be sure they're aware of this message center item and it's MC804766 and make sure they've been into Teams Admin Center and they've updated all their devices before the end of the month, or they might well be hit by a service issue. I think everybody knows about Teams 2. 1 and 1. 0 by now, but just to say it officially, Classic Teams has now reached end of support, the old Teams 1. 0. It will still keep working, users will get bannered saying, this client is end of support, please update. From an admin point of view, be sure to go into your Teams Admin Center and check all your users have updated. You can see the versions there, there's a report on the screen. And you've got until October the 23rd, 2024, before Microsoft will block those old 1. 0 clients signing in. So make sure everybody's updated. This does exclude VDI and Government Cloud. Those are running slightly different dates. And you'll also notice on the Teams icon, the label of new is going to be removed because now that is the main client. So you'll see that new label go away. On the Operator Connect front, not much new there. We've still got 96 countries and 96 providers. We did get some of the providers adding new countries, but no net new countries. If you haven't seen it, we've moved the research site to a new platform just above there. You might be prompted to validate your email with a new code the first time you log into the research site. We've moved it to different platforms so we can add new content, new capabilities, new types of content. Really looking forward to adding some more community research there this year. Last on the news, Skype for Business Server continues to live on in a subscription edition. So if you haven't seen Skype and 2019, Microsoft synced the end of support dates to October 14th, 2025. And we haven't Heard for a long time what the expected plan was for those that wanted to stay on Skype server. We now know that cumulative update eight for Skype Business Server 2019 is during the second half of 2024. That will bring persistent chat in Skype Business Server 2019 and tidy up some of the admin control settings. Then before the 14th of October, 2025, Microsoft will release Skype for Business service subscription edition. Bit of a mouthful. And essentially that will be the same as Skype for Business Server 2019 CU8, plus any additional hotfixes that came in the meantime. So it's not new features, it's not new functionality, and it moves you on to a subscription model where you have to have software assurance or you have to have subscription user licenses, and it will bring Skype for Business Server into the modern support lifecycle model. So if you do Skype for Business Server for whatever business or technical reason, there aren't many anymore, but some people do. You do have this opportunity, but you will be paying on a monthly basis and you will move into the modern lifecycle subscription support policy as well. On to devices news. So first up at InfoComm, we heard that digital signage is coming to MTR. We now know that's due in August. This is for Teams Rooms on Windows with the Pro license. You can either do a basic setup with your own XML on your own web server, or it will be integrated with digital signage providers starting with Appspace and XOGO. Obviously with those providers you'll have to buy your own subscription for those endpoints as well. And you configure either tenant wide digital signage or you can do per room digital signage. This will be coming to Teams Rooms on Android as well following in 2025, so a little bit longer to wait for Teams Rooms on Android. But look out for this in August for Teams Rooms on Windows. Also on Teams Rooms, custom backgrounds are coming to Teams Rooms panels, so we've already got custom backgrounds on Teams Rooms on Windows. We've got them coming soon, actually in August, in Teams Rooms on Android. And now this will be the ability to brand panels for Rooms as well, should you want to. This will be Teams Rooms Pro, but also the shared device license. On the devices hardware front, we've got Sennheiser certifying their TeamsConnect Bar M and Bar S for Microsoft Teams Rooms Windows peripherals. Also, Q-SYS have certified their Vision Suite for Microsoft Teams, so this is their AI accelerated presenter tracking multi camera type setup. Really interesting to see more multi camera options and AI tracking options coming into Teams Rooms on Windows, particularly for those higher end rooms, it's a really great opportunity finally, on devices, we got the announcement of an enhanced capability to do SIP calling into other meetings from Microsoft Teams Rooms. And this is via Pexip and it requires the Teams Rooms Pro portal. So initially Teams Rooms on Windows. And the way it will work is, the meeting room will get, Any invite, find a SIP invite and make that clickable. So it could be Google Meet, could be Zoom, Cisco WebEx, could be any SIP invite. An alternative to Direct Guest Join, which uses WebRTC, but this will be using SIP, which means you get 1080p video, we get dual screen support, we get different layout options, we get HDMI in as well on the sharing. So you will require a Cloud Video Interop provider to do this. The Pexip so far are the only ones that are capable of doing this. So when you click that link, that will be extensiating your Pexip, and Pexip will do the connection between the Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Standards Based SIP Meeting as well. This is due to be coming August. I recently had Pexip host one of the Microsoft UC user groups London. I talked to Marius over at Pexip around how this works, how it connects together, what customers want from it. There's a video above there if you want to check that out. On to events. Events are quite light for July. We tend to get not many in person events. We've still got Teams Fireside Chat. Looking forward to having Traci Herr on this month. We're going to get into the whole Android, Intune, changes in Android management conversation. That's going to be really fun. August for Fireside Chat, we have Miguel. Looking forward to that one. That'll be a bit more of a deep dive on Teams Phone and all things around phone. End of July, I've got a webinar with Graham at Neat and we talk about Teams Rooms on Android and Teams Rooms on Windows and how you make the choice and what fits where. We did that session at Enterprise Connect. Looking forward to doing that as a webinar. That should be fun. Of course, we've got the ongoing monthly Teams. Of course, we've got the ongoing monthly Teams Devices Ask Me Anything session. So those are real deep dive into Teams devices and all the different options. hope to see you at one of those up and coming events. So that's it for this month. A surprising amount of news for July. Again, thanks to Logitech for their support of Empowering.Cloud. Really appreciate them. Excited to see the Dynamics 365 Contact Center becoming generally available. And do be sure to look out for those changes to Teams Phone Resource Accounts and those important updates for Teams Phone and Teams Rooms on Android with those changes coming to service at the end of the month. Hope that's been helpful for you. Got any comments, questions or feedback, do let me know. Thanks a lot.