Welcome back to the podcast. This is the audio version of my monthly teams update. If you want to see the video and grab the deck, you can over empowering cloud, but otherwise hope you enjoy it. 

Microsoft Teams monthly update, September 2024. Many thanks to Pure IP, this month's benefactor for supporting Empowering.Cloud. Really appreciate their support. Pure IP are a long time Microsoft partner, big operator, connect provider, but also have direct routing as a service and managed SBC

really great partner and I really appreciate their support. On to the news, coming off the back of August, it's normally a little bit quieter. Microsoft tends to go a bit quieter.

Everybody in Europe goes away for their holidays as well. But we've still got some big news. General channels being killed off, some changes to call queues, some updates around Teams Phone. So let's jump in. First up, updates on Empowering.Cloud. One of the nice things over the summer is people have a bit more time to join the podcast.

And we've had some amazing podcasts. Mahendra Sekaran come on, who's the CVP for Teams Phone M365 at Microsoft. Microsoft Teams He gave us really good insights to what's going on with Teams and the Teams journey and some talk about how ACS and Teams and IC3 all fit together. We also did a bit of a deep dive on Teams SIP gateway and the SIP gateway journey.

That was a really good one and one that's been super, super popular. Explaining Dynamics 365 Contact Center with Alan Ross. Alan goes into great detail to help us understand how it all fits together and where it's positioned and what customers and use cases are for it. Microsoft Teams We've also had some great briefings. We've got one on Teams Private Line from Carsten, which is really good. And Copilot Usage Reports from Kevin Kieller. He's been really diving in there.

So first news, Teams General Channels are no more. We've had General Channel from day one in Microsoft Teams, and now this is changing. So for existing channels, you can rename the General Channel. Microsoft Teams And that news has been around for a while, so you can right click and rename it. . But now when you create a new team, you won't be able to create a channel called General. Indeed, you'll be prompted for the name of the first channel and it must be something other than General. And once you've renamed General channels, now you can't rename them back to General. So this is coming in September.

So important for users, this is a user communications one. www. Help them understand because when they're creating teams, it will be a slightly different flow. .

A really exciting feature coming to call queues. We're going to get callback for call queues. So this is the ability for someone who's waiting in a queue to press a digit and say, they'd rather be called back at their time in the queue than wait on hold and listen to hold music. . It's still not any documentation and details yet. They're still TBC, but we are starting to see some of those settings show up in PowerShell. So look out for that. A feature that is in traditionally higher end contact centers. Nice to see that coming to call queues. It doesn't seem to be limited to the queues app either.

It seems to be general call queues will get this feature.

Next up, Intelligent Meeting Recap is coming for ad hoc meetings and calls. So we've had Intelligent Meeting Recap for a long while for scheduled sessions. As a reminder, you get Basic Meeting Recap in Teams Core. With Teams Premium, you get Intelligent Recap, which uses AI to make a more advanced recap.

That was only for scheduled meetings. And now for Meet Now or ad hoc calls, i. e. you start from a chat and you escalate to a call. When you hit record, you will automatically get that intelligent recap.

Also some Teams client updates. So this is a really big personal one for me. I've never liked the metadata when you copy paste from Teams. So if you select text in the Teams chat message and you paste it, you also get the author of the message and the timestamp. That's always annoyed me. 

For now, that metadata has completely gone away. It's not user configurable. All the clients, if you copy paste, you will just get the text. Also coming to Mac is voice isolation. So we've had this on Windows for a while. This is rather than just noise reduction. This is actually isolating to your voice, trained on your voice.

Really nice, powerful feature. It does require the voice enrollment. Once you've done that, it will lock into your voice, even if others are speaking around you.

.. Microsoft continuing to drive Teams channel improvements and the UI and the experience so we're now getting channel cards, which is if you float over a channel with your mouse, you'll get details about what the channel's about, who's active in the channel description, those kinds of things.

They're just making it a bit more discoverable. For shared channels

, that's where you create a channel that is shared with members outside of the team. If that URL is shared to people who are not a member of the shared channel, they'll get an option to press a join button, which will ask if they can be admitted to the shared channel. Also Show, Hide the Discover Feed. The Discover Feed, the idea is it's supposed to be surfacing things that are interesting to you. Feedback obviously has been some users don't want to see that.

So now we have a Show, Hide toggle. And finally, Apps are supported in External Chats. So previously Chats between different tenants of different organizations.

Microsoft Teams Couldn't have apps added. They now can have certain apps added, which is really nice. And that can all be policy controlled by the admin as well.

Town hall has also got a number of updates. Microsoft are persistently putting a lot of effort into webinar and town hall and the premium variants of those services to really add significant value there. So Intelligent Recap for unscheduled town halls. I think it's quite a niche use case, but the Intelligent Recap will now be available on Android devices.

. Town hall is getting reactions. It's got a graph API now, which is not premium gated. So you can create, update and publish and even delete town hall events. Also for Teams webinar, we've got create and registration API updates as well.

And lastly, for Town Hall, you can now export the Q& A after the event. So it exports to a CSV so you can understand what questions were asked or any kind of follow up. Nice to see Microsoft continuing to invest in these higher end experiences around Webinar and Town Hall.

 Copilot update, we definitely can't go a month without a Copilot update, even through August, which was relatively quiet. We did get a roadmap item for 12 new languages being added to Copilot. This is coming in September. Which is making it more accessible to more users, which is really nice. on to rooms, and devices, off, , I've talked for the last couple of months around the chat notification re service retirement impacting older unsupported phones.

Tom Arbuthnot: So it was the case that these older phones, the Yale Link T series, the CP 900, some of the HP Polys were going to stop working when the chat notification service was retired at the end of September. They are end of life and out of support, but a few customers were still running, lots of those phones because they just carried on working.

Now, Microsoft have found a way to update those phones. So they'll continue to work. , So they still remain out of support or unsupported, but Microsoft are going to patch them. So they'll continue to work even when the chat notification service retires.

. You will only get this MC notification. If you've got some of those phones running in your tenant, they should be auto updated, but make sure they are updated and then they'll continue to work after September 30th when the chat notification service retires.

Teams Rooms Updates. We got some updates on Teams Rooms on Windows, Dynamic Video Tile Sizing on Teams Rooms on Windows based on the participant count. So if there's one person in the room, it will do a normal size tile, but if there are two or more people in the remote room, it will expand the tile. 

Text and UI resizing on Teams Rooms on Windows as well. And also stop and start recording on Teams Rooms on Windows with Pro. 

As part of all the AI changes, Microsoft has really been tidying up how recordings and policy controls work around recording and transcription. And now meeting recordings always end up in the organizers OneDrive. OneDrive. So previously, when you hit record, it would be the person who hit record who ended up storing the recording and having permissions over it.

Now it always ends up in the meeting organizers OneDrive. And because of that, we can now start and stop recordings directly on the Teams Room. Previously, you had to have someone join who was a user to hit record. But now if you hit record on the Teams Room interface, the recording will still go to that organizers OneDrive.

On the Teams Rooms on Android side, we've got custom backgrounds rolling out again, Pro for that. That's really nice to see loads of customers wanting to brand those Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. And join Zoom meetings from ID and passcode on Teams Rooms on Android as well.

Also BYOD meeting rooms and meeting scenarios continue to get love from Microsoft. So features getting added, a lot of the AI capabilities are coming into those BYOD scenarios. So BYOD now, when you plug into a device that's been identified as a BYOD device, and that happens when five or more unique devices plug into it, it will show up in the www.

microsoft. com Now the Teams client will automatically understand that's a BYOD scenario and recommend the BYOD setup and to use the room audio, roadmap 413710. And also in room participant grouping for the BYOD room. So this is really cool. So if there are multiple people in the BYOD room, they'll be grouped in the roster under that BYOD room exactly like Microsoft Teams rooms do.

And this is all part of identifying individuals in the room. So obviously they will need to enroll for voice and face recognition. They will need to be invited to the meeting, but this will allow the intelligent capabilities of transcript and recognition and labeling to happen in BYOD scenarios. So Microsoft really adding some significant value to those BYOD scenarios.

Another one that a lot of customers have asked for, Cloud Video Interop supporting PowerPoint Live. as a reminder, Cloud Video Interop is the ability for standard based rooms to join Teams meetings. At the moment, when PowerPoint Live is used by a presenter, that doesn't translate through to the standards based SIP rooms.

Soon it will, so PowerPoint Live will be encoded into a video feed. Obviously it won't be interactive, it will just be a static video feed. But it does mean that anybody presenting on PowerPoint Live, those standards based endpoints are going to be able to see that. Also a reminder that we did a pretty deep comparison of the CVI options on our research site.

Everybody in the community is welcome to check out that research comparison, we'd love to see your feedback, just log in at members. empowering. cloud and there's a whole load of other research there again, welcome to check it out and we'd love your feedback.

Quite a few new items on the certified device list, Owl Labs have got their first certified peripheral for Microsoft Teams Rooms, the Owl3 Intelligent 360. Viewsonic have got their first Microsoft Teams Room certified. Logi have got a new Rally Bar plus Mic Pods with Lenovo Core Bundle. Yealink have the MVC S40 Bar certified.

And Yealink have also announced that they will have a set of new IP phones, the MPE2 series, that will be ready to support Microsoft devices ecosystem platform. Mdep continuing to get interest. 

If you're interested in MDEP, we had a really good podcast on Teams Insider Podcast that we dived into what MDEP isn't. You can check that out. , and also while we're talking about podcasts, had a really good customer perspective from Dan Hall on Microsoft Teams Rooms and Android and managing Android devices. Thought he raised some really good points. So if you're in the devices space, do check that podcast out for a customer perspective on Teams Rooms and Teams Rooms on Android.

I wanted to highlight that the Microsoft Teams Room recent bootcamp is now available on the partner portal. So you do need to be a partner to log into this. There's a whole day of rooms content and then there's a converged comms track which covers Teams Phone and Copilot. Really great depth training, definitely worth checking that out.

Links are in the deck. On to events, there's a lot going on. We're in September, so we're into event season. Thanks Really excited to get out there and get speaking again. I'll be speaking at the Ribbon Insights event next week. Looking forward to that. Talking about the UC market. We have Ron Pessner who's CVP responsible for Loop.

Talking about Loop on Teams Fireside Chat. That'll be really good. Loop is getting really integrated into Teams. So if you're in Teams, it's worth understanding what's happening. And also there's the new Loop 2. 0. We've got the regular Teams devices. Ask us anything. A big community event Metaverse 1 that is happening 18th of September online.

Lots of mesh there as you might expect and AR, VR, of Copilot content and a bit of Teams content there as well. If you're in or around London, we have the Microsoft UCU's Group London. Logi kindly hosting us this month. MVP. Randy Chapman will be guesting and doing a session with a customer all around Teams as well. 

Be sure to check out the Teams Room learning hours from Microsoft. The first one's already been, there's a link there to the YouTube recording. Next one is all around ASOP. That's going to be really good. 1st of October. And again, if you're in around London or Europe, UC Expo is coming 2nd and 3rd of October.

Martin Boam and I will be doing a Teams and Copilot roadmap session. I'm also doing a customer panel all around Copilot. So it's only customers who are actively rolling out Copilot in the hundreds of seats and what have their experience been. UC Expo is always a great chance to catch up with everybody in the industry as well.

 I also wanted to call out that Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 announcement is coming September 16th online half hour session from Satya Nadella and Jarad That is going to be really insightful. There's some big announcements coming around Copilot, so be sure to check that out. And I'll be definitely doing a summary and an email update shortly after that event, so if you're not on the email list, do get on the email list and you'll get the summary of that event as well.

 And that's it for September. So thanks very much. If you've made it to the deep end of this briefing, really hope it's useful for you. If you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, do let me know. And again, many thanks to Pure IP, this month's benefactor, making everything we do at Empowering.Cloud possible.

We really appreciate their support. Thanks a lot.