Hi and welcome back to the podcast. This is the audio of my monthly Teams update. Everything you need to know in under 15 minutes. If you want to see the full video and slides, you can catch over on LinkedIn or X or on Empowering Cloud along with the full PowerPoint deck and all the links. Hope you find it useful.

On with the show. 

Tom: Microsoft Teams monthly update February 2025. Many thanks to Ribbon, this month's sponsor. Really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud. Ribbon have an awesome portfolio of Microsoft voice solutions, SBCs from carrier grade through to enterprise, physical and virtual, as well as cloud services. If you need a voice solution for Microsoft Teams, do be sure to check them out.

Lots to talk about this month. I'm just off the back of ISE, a big show in Barcelona all around AV tech. So lots of Microsoft Teams rooms news, new devices, but also some Teams news and roadmap items across the board. So let's jump in. First up on Empowering Cloud, we've got some new content. We have a great expert briefing on Dynamics 365 Contact Center with newly minted MVP, Chris Goodwill.

Chris is really good at explaining and decoding where Dynamics 365 Contact Center plays, how it hangs together, how the pricing model works, etc. So be sure to check out that briefing. We also have a great product briefing from Luware. , , Marcus and Martina take us through all the road map and some customer examples.

That's quite a good one. And from Ribbon as well. And in partnership with Ribbon, I've done a white paper on five reasons on premises telephony still remains key. Looking at how customers using their Edgemark series on prem and why on prem connectivity is important, even when you're moving to UCAS platforms like Microsoft Teams.

We've also had a busy month on the podcast, some really great shows and customer perspectives. Chandra took us through what he does as Vice President of Engineering for Microsoft Teams, and he's kindly introduced us to some of his team for future pods as well. We talked about video with Olly Henderson at Jabra.

City of Independence, a great case study of moving to Microsoft Teams across 20 locations, really complicated scenario. That's with AVI-SPL. And Teams phone system success at Derby City Council. Again, interesting to see a different customer perspective there. And also I caught up with Brad at Crestron and we talked about some of the customer examples of where they're enhancing meetings with AI 

And if you missed them on linkedin, here's a list of all the video interviews I did at ISE caught up with some great solution providers there and some microsoft people as well Really good perspectives from the show and a little bit of a look at some of the new kit We're going to talk about as well.

Tom: Before we get into the ISE news, Microsoft just the week before ISE unveiled Microsoft Teams Room's Express Install. And this is a new kind of recommendation of kit for simple, quick, easy, small room installs. So for Microsoft Teams rooms, but coming with either a desk based stand or a floor standing stand.

And the idea here is you can single person install in under an hour and be up and running. So it can be drop shipped. You need power and you need network connectivity and everything is there. You don't need to retrofit and drill holes and mount the screen and that kind of thing. So really simplifying the effort and cost it takes to put video in small rooms. 

I saw examples of these from Logi, Jabra and MaxHub. Others will be coming as well. . And the idea is it's a bundled SKU. So you've got the stand, the screen and the MTR all in one, nice and easy. .

Tom: And this is a great one for customers to understand if they buy an Express Rooms install kit, they'll have a nice easy install. They don't need to retrofit extra cable runs and mount screens and some of the more complex stuff of a full in room install. Nice simple install, minimum pro serve effort and generally quite easy to do.

So onto ISE, it was a really great show about 85, 000 people, amazingly massive show, lots of people from Microsoft there, all the key OEM a really good week catching up with everybody. Thanks for everybody who made time to catch up with me. On the kit side, we saw quite a few new announcements. So we saw the PanaCast 40 VBS.

I've got a video on that. And also Olly Henderson was on the podcast last week talking about Jabra and their video strategy. Essentially, this is a small room bar, Android bar. , bringing down the price point as well.

Neat Bar Pro got certified with Shure's complete room. The Neat Bar Pro got certified by Microsoft with the Shure Complete Room Bundle. So that's using Shure's AV tech with the Neat Bar Pro Android MTR bar. Shure announced their full portfolio of Microsoft Teams rooms, and that's bringing the Shure Intellimix AV technology into the room.

Windows MTRs, Hudley cameras, Shure ceiling, tile, mic, and speakers. So full bundle, end to end from Shure. That's very interesting. MAXHUB a preview their 92 inch Microsoft Teams rooms on Windows. I got to go hands on with that essentially think of a very big wide Teams rooms Windows board so you can just mount it and you have a and so you can just mount it and you have a massive wide Teams rooms on Windows board.

Logi, they pre announced this for ISE, but they were there showing the Logi Spot. Really excited about those. The RallyBoard is already Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android certified. And it's going through the process to certify with an extra compute unit for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows as well. And the Hudley cameras got certified for a 5 camera multi cam solution as well.

So great to see some more innovative kit coming through. It was also a big focus on BYOD, which was interesting, both BYOD in the sense of having passed through on some MTR devices, but also dedicated BYOD units and a lot of conversation about what Microsoft are doing to optimize that BYOD experience as well.

Also, a big conversation at ISE was MDEP. The MDEP team announced some new partnerships including Crestron and Owl labs. So you can see from this slide here, these are some of the OEM and ODM partners that they now have, and I'm keeping a close eye on this to see who's releasing what there's lots of partnerships announced.

We're still waiting for a kit to come through. Obviously it takes a while for particularly new devices to cycle through, but you've got Jabra, Audio Codes, MaxHub. Crestron and Owlabs as OEMs now all saying they're in partnership and committed to bringing devices So we'll be keeping an eye out this year for those devices coming to market And also relationships with some of the ODMs and a new relationship with Capgem Where these are companies that will build solutions around MDEP for OEMs potentially I had a good conversation with the MDEP team. You can check that on the link if you want to check that out. And I'll be talking more about MDEP at Enterprise Connect. One of the panels I'm on, David Danto's panel, is talking about MDEP and its impact on the industry.

So that should be very interesting.

If you've got any questions or thoughts about MDEP, do let me know. It'd be interesting to hear them.

Next up, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows Boards. So this is the board all in one form factor, but with Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. We've seen them announced from Yealink and MaxHub. Others are coming as well. So not. So no longer exclusive to the Surface Hub. Now we'll have other OEMs doing Microsoft Teams rooms, Windows boards.

Also, we've got an exciting announcement that Microsoft are going to allow Edge browser on the Microsoft Teams rooms on Windows boards. So you'll be able to launch the Edge browser. You'll be able to sign into web apps, use third party apps. You'll also be able to generally browse from the board as well.

So this will be some kind of containerized Edge solution. But this brings back some of the capability to use the board for multiple scenarios that we had in Service Hub, but into the Windows MTR boards, and that will eventually be coming to the Microsoft Teams rooms on Android boards as well. Talking Microsoft Teams rooms on Windows, we've got now got Talking of Microsoft Teams rooms on Windows, we've now got support for multiple cameras, so up to four single stream cameras individually connected on USB, connecting directly to the MTR.

That's important hubs aren't really supported. So you have to make sure you've got enough USB inputs on your MTR compute. You need at least an i5 to do multiple cameras. If you want three. You need at least an i5 to do multiple cameras. If you want two or three cameras, you need ninth gen. If you want to go up to four cameras, you need the Intel 12th gen CPUs.

So more house, so more horsepower on the Windows MTR is important. It's multi camera scenarios. And the first rev here is about remote. And the first rev here is about remote participants having multiple camera views, being able to select the view toggle between views. You can see in the future how maybe we'll do more here around pulling multiple streams up to the cloud and doing some clever mixing and directing.

And right now it's about giving different options of view. Check out the release notes. There's been some details added for multiple cameras specifically there and the learn article there on how to configure multiple cameras. Microsoft Teams Super Resolution. So those of you that were eagle eyed might have seen this announced at Ignite.

And this is actually a Copilot Plus PC feature. So it's the ability to use the NPU on the Copilot Plus PCs to upscale resolution in a Teams call dynamically. Idea is you've got a low bandwidth, low bitrate scenario, not very good resolution video. It uses the AI on the laptop device to upscale the video.

Initially exclusive to Snapdragon CPUs, the Qualcomm CPUs. It will be coming to Intel and AMD Copilot Plus PCs in the future as well. And I'd be interested to get your thoughts on how much of an impact this makes. There's a link here and you can see on the screen here. I can see a difference. It's a fairly subtle difference.

Apparently during the surveys, the average increase in CMOS. Apparently during testing, the average up, apparently during testing, the average increase in CMOS was 0. 6. So not huge leaps and bounds but I do have a Copilot Plus Snapdragon PC, love it, loads of battery life, no fan noise. So I'll be giving this a go and I'll give you my feedback on LinkedIn as to how it looks.

Jumping over to SharePoint for a minute. SharePoint Spaces is getting retired. The reason this is interesting to out space is this is using mixed reality in SharePoint. So the idea was you can create a mixed reality environment around showcasing content that lives in SharePoint. It hasn't had the pickup Microsoft hoped for, so they're going to knock it on the head and they're recommending everybody moves to Mesh for their virtual reality, mixed reality scenarios as well.

. If you are using this environment or might be using this environment, there's some details here to check out how you can find out which sites have got this enabled and then how you can deal with that. So check out the knowledge base article there.

Moving on to Teams Phone, we did get some new OC provider announcements. So we've got SoftBank now who are covering Japan. That brings us up to 106 providers covering 104 countries. And also excitingly, we've got a new Teams Phone mobile provider. It's been quite slow having those Teams Phone Mobile providers come through.

This is a new one. Odido have coverage in the Netherlands. So they're the 8th Teams Phone Mobile provider. Just as a reminder, this is where the mobile provider is tightly integrated to Teams and they can provision mobile numbers to be used both on a cell and on Teams. We're still waiting for Teams Phone Mobile from AT& T, Voda and VMO2 in the UK.

Those have been announced, so those should be coming through in due course as well. And if you want to dig into all the coverage and all the options, you can check out in the members area in Empowering Cloud, which is free to access for the community, all the breakdown in Power BI of who covers what, what countries are covered for both Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile.

Okay. Let's have a look at Roadmap. We've got some interesting announcements. We've got Miracast. We'll be coming to Microsoft Teams rooms on Windows. No public ETA yet on that, but at the moment we have teams sharing or teams casting. So you can go into the teams client and share and it pings up a meeting, but Microsoft's are adding that mirror cast capability, which was, I think it was a bit easier to discover.

Queues app is adding monitor, barge, whisper and takeover. That is coming mid March. Quite an uplifting capabilities for that Queues app scenario. That's part of teams premium.

The SIP Gateway team are doing a preview, early access of some new features, new capabilities, check out that knowledge Check out that message center article if you want to align some phones to some new addresses for SIP Gateway, just for testing purposes. Teams location sharing consent is changing.

This is quite important for emergency services and E911 type location stuff. So previously it was controlled by the operating system, allowing location sharing, but now there will be a capability in teams for the user to say yes or no, they want to share location. So make sure you understand that if you're in an E911 or so make sure you understand that if you're in an E911 location, there might be some user training there to show them they need to share that location at the team's application level.

Microsoft Teams is getting a live mic volume indicator. So this has been a long time coming, but this is the thing that where the mic will bounce with a green bar when somebody's talking. Really useful if you're having headset issues and you don't know if it's you or the remote party. You can see if the audio is coming through from your headset or mic into Teams.

And finally, back to Rooms, we've got occup And finally, back to Rooms, we've got occupancy sensors capabilities coming through to Teams panels. So this is the ability for an occupancy sensor in the room to tell the Teams panel the room is occupied or potentially embedded into some Teams rooms devices as well.

So the idea here is today, the Teams panels outside the room will go red if the meeting is booked. But with these occupancy sensors, if somebody just walks into a room and doesn't book it, it can still flick the room to red so that you know the room's taken if they've just wandered in and taken over the room, even without booking the room.

That's the news for this month. Let's have a quick look at events coming up. So we've got Michelle Bowman on Fireside  

That's it for news this month. Let's have a quick look at upcoming events. Teams Fireside Chat we've got Michelle Bowman going through all the ISE news and generally the rooms news. If you're

If you're in and around Mexico City, CS LATAM is just around the corner. We have our usual Microsoft Teams device to ask us anything online. A couple of Microsoft webinars there around Teams Premium that might be interesting. If you're into Copilot, we have Abram Jackson talking about Copilot extensibility on the Copilot Fireside Chat.

And if you're in the UK or in and around London, we have the in person news group in London. And that is the 26th of Feb. Then looking a bit further out, we're not that far out from Enterprise Connect. Really excited for that one. There's going to be lots of Microsoft news there as well. And I'll be doing a couple of sessions and online.

I've got an audio codes webinar coming up all around their recording solution. They recently revved a lot of capabilities in there. True cloud platform, really interesting conversation and with pure IP, we're pulling in Tina Shepard and we're talking around teams phone and getting ready for the next financial year, how you can optimize with teams phone, save money.

We're going to talk about different connectivity options. We're gonna talk about shared calling. Talk about use cases around things like queues app and other premium capabilities in teams phone as well. So I hope to see you at some of those events, either online or in person. 

So that's it for this month. Hope that's been a useful update for you. 

Tom: Many thanks to Ribbon for their support. Really appreciate them. If you've got any questions or comments, do put them below and looking forward to another big update next month with all the Enterprise Connect news.

Thanks a lot.