Hi, it's Tom. Thanks as always for listening to the podcast. This is the audio version of my Microsoft Teams, monthly update for August. If you want to see the full video and grab the power point, start you head over to empowering.cloud, but otherwise hope you enjoy the update. And if you've got a second, it would really help us if you rated the podcast in apple podcasts or in Spotify. The ratings really help spread the word on the podcast. Thanks. And hope you enjoyed the show.

Microsoft Teams Monthly Update, August 2024. Many thanks to Ribbon, this month's benefactor. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. Look out for Ribbon Insights, their partner event, which is September 10th, 11th, and 12th in Prague. I'll be there speaking about UC, Teams, and the UC market, and they've got a whole host of other experts speaking.

Ribbon's partner events really are great, so if you're a Ribbon partner, or if you're not a Ribbon partner, you should be one. Check out that Prague event again, Ribbon Insights, September 10th, Hope to see you there. [00:01:00] Normally August is a little bit quieter. We've had Microsoft's end of year. There's usually a lot of features coming up in the rush to the end of the year, then it goes into planning mode and all goes a bit quiet, but we have got some new features, quite a lot of new Teams client features, some important support date changes, and some device updates as well.

So let's jump right in.

If you haven't seen, we've got some great new content on Empowering Cloud. We've got an expert briefing from Nikki on searching for Teams messages. Neil Fluster took me on a virtual tour of their customer experience center and we went through all the Crestron Teams devices, Flexpods, AirMedia, the Teams Rooms, and saw some of their unique capabilities including the 1Beyond cameras, so if you want a good overview of the Crestron portfolio for Teams do check that out.

 We like getting customer stories on the podcast. So we've got DERTOUR, who are a tour operator. That was a really interesting insight in how they improve their customer experience with Teams. They're also a Landis customer. Got an excellent briefing [00:02:00] around BT's large scale Teams Rooms deployment.

MDEP Explained, the Microsoft devices ecosystem platform. Really important information, worth checking that out. And a lot of other good content as well.

So be sure to check that out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. I had someone the other day surprised that you could get the podcast on Apple and Spotify, but yes, you can just search for it and you'll find it right there. Okay. biggest news this month is the Microsoft Quarterly Earnings were just released.

So this is the end of their FY24 Q4. Always interesting to look at the earnings calls and see what Microsoft is talking about because that is what is in focus for them. Overall numbers were really strong, revenues up, operating income up, earnings is all up. So another strong quarter for Microsoft. The main theme for the earnings call was Copilot.

I think Copilot was mentioned 42 times on the earnings call. So you can always tell what the priorities for Microsoft by what's mentioned. 000 organizations using Copilot up [00:03:00] 180 percent year on year. The number of customers with 10, 000 or more Copilot seats enabled doubled. We didn't get an absolute number on how many customers that is.

50, 000 organizers using Copilot Studio to build their own custom Copilots, which is up 70 percent quarter on quarter. Office 365 revenue grew 14 percent and that's largely reflecting E5 increase and Copilot for Microsoft 365 sales growth.

And they particularly called out Copilot in GitHub. GitHub's annual revenue is now 2 billion Copilot accounted for 40 percent of that revenue growth this year. We did get some Teams mentions, not many, but we got Teams Premium has now surpassed 3 million seats. that's up 400 percent year on year.

So massive growth percentage wise, but still a lot of opportunity in premium. That's only 3 million seats of 320 million monthly active users. So you'll continue to see Microsoft pushing hard on premium this financial year.

something that did get a lot of call outs in the earnings call was Dynamics 365 [00:04:00] Contact Center. Satya pointed out that Dynamics 365 Contact Center is Copilot first, AI first, and gave some customer examples. They said that internally at Microsoft, they're on course to save hundreds of millions of dollars on their own customer support and contact center operations.

And they're trying to position the idea that GitHub Copilot is now bigger than GitHub in terms of revenue when it was first bought by Microsoft. And they want to see the same thing happen in contact center with Dynamics. They think that AI is going to be the thing that's going to drive Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

I'm really excited to have Alan Ross, who is the Microsoft Partner Group PM Manager for Dynamics 365 Contact Center coming on the podcast. We're actually recording that next week. So look out for a Deep Dive Teams Insider Podcast all around Dynamics 365 Contact Center. If you've got any Dynamics 365 Contact Center questions, let me know.

I'll see if I can get the answers to those, but certainly going to be interesting to watch Dynamics 365 Contact Center and its impact on the market this financial year. Okay, on to the Teams updates. We got [00:05:00] a number of Teams client improvements this month. So an enhanced search experience with message suggestions.

So as you're typing in the search bar, you'll get some recommended pop ups around search results, enhanced sound notification controls. And basically this is the ability to set a custom tone for urgent messages and priority contacts. So you can have a different message tone for those urgent messages compared to your normal messages.

The ability to turn on and off notifications for a specific post in channels Really key for me to tightly control those notifications. And we've got a new meeting gallery layout in the Teams Client. This gives you a number of new capabilities, so it starts off with everybody having an equal size tile, whether they've got their camera turned on or off.

You can tweak it to say you want to prioritize video participants. The default layout is 16 participants, but you can use the drop down and choose to have 4, 9, 16 or up to 49 people in the layout. It automatically changes the layout and optimizes positioning for certain people. So for example, people [00:06:00] with raised hands and active speakers will come to the front of the stage by default.

You can choose to hide yourself. So some people don't like looking at themselves in the gallery, you can turn yourself off. And probably the best feature, I think, is Teams Rooms, when they join, they'll automatically get a larger tile. So you can see above on the graphic there, the Teams Room by default gets a wider tile, which makes sense because you'll probably like to have more people in that room scenario.

So really nice new layout, look out for that on the Teams Client.

Custom emojis, you can see here I had a go at this, we've got a custom empowering cloud emoji now in our tenant. So you can literally create your own emojis, any user can upload a graphic, it's on by default. Once they're created and uploaded, custom emojis can be used across the entire tenant and IT admins can control who can create them, who can delete them, and of course IT admins can turn them off as well.

But it is on by default, so that's one of those ones if you're in an enterprise setting you want to think about what your policy is towards those.

This is a great one for Copilot [00:07:00] customers, Microsoft Copilot Dashboard is now going to be available as part of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. So previously you need a Viva Insights license to get this extra reporting capability, but Microsoft is now going to open it up for all Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers.

I think this is really important to understand how Copilot for Microsoft 365 is working for you, which users are getting the most out of it, which personas.

Customers with over 100 assigned Copilot for Microsoft 365 license or 10 assigned Viva Premium licenses will get this lit up now. Customers with less than a hundred should get it lit up in the next three months or so. But customers with less than a hundred can use the current tenant level reporting for the Copilot dashboard right now.

so look out for that, particularly if you're over a hundred Copilot seats, that is definitely worth digging into lots of good data in there. On to device news. 

First up, we've got speaker recognition has now rolled out for all Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. So previously you needed the intelligent speakers, which are [00:08:00] actually intelligent microphones, but now all room hardware will be able to do speaker recognition using clever cloud processing. You'll still need your users enrolled for speaker recognition, so they will need to have that on at the tenant level and they will need to have enrolled.

And this uses cloud based technology to work out the data. who's who in the meeting and add their names to the roster you can see there. It is coming later to Android and BYOD scenarios. So eventually this will work across Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows and Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android and BYOD.

It's a really nice feature for intelligent meeting recap and of course for Copilot. Microsoft Teams Rooms also got an update. They're going to 5.1.24.0 No massive features in this except the support for Windows 23 H2. So eligible Windows 11 devices will go up to 23 H2. There's a few fixes and bug fixes, but nothing else major.

Devices, got a number of updates. These are Teams [00:09:00] phones and Teams panels. So Teams phones get a button for explicit recording consent. This is where your admin says that meetings must have every user explicitly consent to recording. So what happens here, if that policy is enabled is when the recording button is pressed by somebody, everybody goes on to mute for audio and video.

They get a pop up saying do you consent to be recorded? If they say yes, they can then unmute and continue engaging. If they don't engage with that prompt or they say no, then they remain a view only participant. So now that will work on Teams phones. Private UI. 

Not sure if you can see in the graphic, but it says incoming call private line there. and they're also listed separately in call history. We've got a lightweight People app, which gives you the ability to engage with contacts on the phone, switch between different contact lists and create contact groups, which I know is something that people want.

A richer call history on the phones, and also call transfer improvement as well. [00:10:00] On Teams panels, we've got an update rolling out as well, and that just fixes some authentication and check in bugs. As always, be sure to make sure your Microsoft Teams devices, your phones, your panels are up to date.

Talking of Android, there are some Android Teams Rooms and Teams Phone support date changes. Microsoft made an important clarification about how the support timelines or the certification timelines work. As a recap, Microsoft certify devices based on their Android operating system. And that defines the period where they'll be certified and fully supported by Microsoft.

And that is five years from the Android OS release date. So not from when the device is certified, but from the Android that it's running support date. So depending on when the device certifies, near the start of the Android life cycle, it may get, four years, potentially if it certifies right at the end of the life cycle may get less.

As always, OEMs can then upgrade the Android and [00:11:00] recertify depending on which chip they've got. And if they choose to deploy that Android OS, some OEMs will typically skip a version as well, potentially, So Android 12's end date has changed. It's now August 15th, 2027. It was previously October 6th, 2026.

So with that extension, it's actually getting five years, 10 months until the end of its certification. Android 13 is correctly aligned to the five year period. that will end August 15th, 2027. and at the end of that certification life cycle, Microsoft makes efforts to support them for another two years.

As always, understand with your Android devices, what Android OS they're running, and what the OEM is doing in terms of chipset and future updates. And that will help you understand the life cycle of that device.

I think I talked briefly about this last month, but the date has now changed. this is Microsoft decommissioning the legacy chat service, which sounds fairly innocuous, but the older Android devices [00:12:00] depend on this chat service for a notification that they're ringing, so for incoming calls.

This doesn't affect any current supported devices, but it does affect some of the legacy no longer supported devices. So Teams phones on Android 8. 1 or Android 9, they can't be updated any further. So they're stuck on an old Teams client. Those were working fine, even though they were unsupported, but as of September 30th, they will break.

They won't have any incoming calls anymore. So look out for older devices in your tenants. The phones are listed there that are impacted,

and if you do have that impact on your tenant you'll see it in MC810172. Something to watch out for is those phones, if on your tenant, will show as up to date because they're as up to date as they're ever going to be. So they won't flag in the Teams Admin Center as out of date.

So be careful, make sure you understand which devices you're running and particularly check for any of those older Android 8. 1 or Android 9 devices. Because again, they will stop working as of 30th of [00:13:00] September.

And another support date announcement, it feels like it's support date announcement month.

Microsoft has announced they're going to stop supporting the Teams Display devices as of September 30th, 2025. So these are the all in one dedicated personal Teams devices, designed to be more of a user device or a hot desk device. Microsoft,

as with the other dates, will make reasonable efforts to support them for a further two years beyond that date. So you'll take you up to September 2027, but there probably won't be any further investment in features or capabilities. Some of those OEM devices will have the capability to run Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android instead.

So potentially you could flash them over to a Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, although different licensing stack for that as well. I'm talking to all the OEMs on all the devices, so I'm going to get the details together of what you can do with which of those devices. But if you have got any Teams displays in play, take a look at that and be aware of those dates.

This is a really good video that's worth [00:14:00] catching. It's Ilya's InfoComm Keynote. It was a little while ago now, but it's just hit YouTube. He talks about the collaboration market, what's Microsoft's doing, some of the BYOD room information, the voice isolation, multi camera.

It's a really great overview of what's going on in our space at the moment. So there's a link there, do check that out. On to device news, first off the Jabra Panacast 50 is now certified for intelligent camera and multi stream IntelliFrame and people recognition.

So this is a big deal. This means that that device can send. multiple concurrent streams to the Teams service. So rather than sending a composite feed, device can take a panoramic of the room and stream that into the Teams service, and it can also send individual streams for the current speaker and the most recent speaker. which gives you a much better layout and understanding of what's going on the room. So that's the device physically sending multiple streams.

That works today on the Teams desktop client is coming to Teams Rooms on Android as a [00:15:00]receiver.

So that's really cool to see that genuine multi stream technology coming through. 

Also on Devices, Shure's, Transmitter, Access Point and Ceiling Tile Speaker are now certified for Microsoft Teams. this access point and transmitter is really cool. So the boundary transmitter is a little mic you can move around and you can obviously have a handheld mic as well.

Great for education scenarios and these can go into Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows and the ceiling speaker, I think that was certified before but it's now certified as part of this bundle as well. So really nice gear from Shure, lovely to see that for the education use cases as well. Roadmap Watch, we've got a few things this month.

Native controls for Group Framing, Active Speaker, and Edge Composed Intelliframe are coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. this is the ability to control those camera controls natively in Teams Rooms on Windows, so not having to rely on OEM controls, which is really [00:16:00] nice. Local PTZ, that's Pan, Tilt, Zoom for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows is coming. So again, this feature will be native. It will require support from the cameras, but you'll be able to do it in the Teams Rooms UI, which is really nice.

And presenters being able to join and present from Microsoft Teams Rooms in Town Halls is also coming towards the end of this year as well. So we've got this slow move from Live Events to Town Halls. This is another one of those blockers that will be unblocked, the ability for the presenter to be on a Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows.

Finally, let's wrap up with some events. Generally, it's quieter in August for events, but we still have our regular online activity happening. We've got Teams Fireside Chat this month with Miguel, we're going into the Queues app, and also some Teams Phone and Premium scenarios.

Michael's got his regular Teams Fridays. He's got Tony Woodruff talking about Copilot. Tony's great, that's one not to miss. We've got our regular Microsoft Teams devices, Ask Us Anything.

Looking a bit further [00:17:00] out to September, there's the Ribbon Partner Conference, the Insights Conference in Prague. That is September 10th 12th. Again, I'll be speaking there, looking forward to that. If you're going to be there, let me know. A bit further out again, September, Fireside Chat. We've got Ron Pesner talking about Microsoft Loop. Really looking forward to that one. And even further out, September 19th, we've got the Microsoft UC User Group London. And then October, we're fully back into event season with UC Expo.

We're getting really great turnout for the Fireside Chats and the Microsoft Teams Asks Anything, they're growing every month. if you're watching this monthly update and you've got to the deep end, I bet you would enjoy the deep dives we have on those sessions as well. That's it for August. Many thanks to everybody for listening to the update and many thanks to Ribbon for their support. Really appreciate them. Hope it was useful.

If you've got any questions, comments or feedback, do let me know. Thanks a lot.