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.

Microsoft Teams monthly update March, 2025. This is the Enterprise Connect Special. Many thanks to Pure IP for their support. Really apprecIlyate them. Check them out for all your team telephony, connectivity needs. Operator connect, direct routing, managed SBC. Lots of news to go through have just come off the back of Enterprise Connect. 

We've got teams clients updates, we've got rooms updates, we've got AI updates, of course. So let's get stuck straight in. If you haven't seen them yet, check out the latest briefings on Empowering.Cloud.

We have a great briefing. Diving into the chat and channels changes, also, check out briefings with AudioCodes on meeting insights. Neat. And the app hub and how that works.

 And some great AI examples in contact center with Landis as well. And on the podcast, you know, we like a customer perspective and we had a great one from Tom Garland at WTW, all on their teams phone journey. We had a deep dive on teams Premium that was really good.

Teams phone and rooms at Kingfisher. Again, matched really great perspective on everything they've done on their journey. 

Ali Ward gave us a great perspective on managing M365 change, 

you can check all those out on your favorite podcast player or on YouTube. All right, into the updates. First up, we have a lot of client updates. We've talked a lot about the new chats and channels experience combining chats and channels.

I'm a real fan of that. It makes life so much easier for me. 

But also there are lots of changes in the client in terms of being able to snap. So using the window snap capability to resize the client. Half screen, full screen, quarter screen resizing chat channels and meetings panes as you see fit to be the right size for you. Popping out meeting panels as well.

Improved zooming and scaling. And beyond just resizing the client files is going to become shared. So files tab will become shared tab and that will incorporate files that are shared into the chat and channels as well as files that live in the channel.

In the case of channels, shared collaboration spaces, which are a new loop tab in channels, Viva Engage storyline, we know is being integrated into teams. 

Security was one of the call outs, Ilya made in the keynote, and one of those features is URL and file protection. That's using defender technology and that's for internal and external chat and group chats, meeting chat and channels. Another security feature called out in the keynote was brand interpretation protection.

And that is where if external parties are attempting to impersonate a brand to try and trick people into messaging them.

Teams will automatically warn the user. This doesn't seem right. Are you sure you want to continue?

We talked about live web chat in January that is now available. It's only available to small organizations, though it is. A 365 business feature and a maximum of 25 users. This is the ability to have a web chat widget on your website and pushes through to chat in an app in teams. Really nice feature for small organizations. 

Interpreter agent was really the start of the show in terms of the keynote. 

This is the ability to have a teams meeting or teams call and receive an interpretation in your preferred language. It will launch with nine languages supported, and it's still, an ETA of early 2025. It will require a Copilot license. 

Let's have a look at the demo from the Enterprise Connect keynote. Apologies for the angle. I just shot this on my iPhone, but hopefully it gives you an idea.

 I've heard that you can speak German. Is that right? Yes, I can. So, Let me go ahead and invite our interpreter agent, because I don't understand German.

And now, maybe you can demonstrate some of your German skills. Guten Tag, Ilya. Wie geht's? Um, This way. Ilya, how are you?

I speak a little German, and I understand most of it. As a young engineer, I worked in Heidelberg for three years. So not only did the interpreter agent make German understandable for me It did so in Snorre's own voice.

Really great to see that demo live. It's interesting because of German sentence structure. The AI needs to have the complete sentence to interpret it. So actually German is one of the hardest languages to do this and there's a slightly longer pause with German translation because it has to get right to the end of the sentence to understand the sentence and interpret it. Great demo. And I'll let you know when we've got a more specific ETA on the interpreter agent.

Moving on to meetings and events. Meetings. Again, security features were highlighted. So if you share a file into a meeting with Teams premium, and the file has a sensitivity label, 

the meeting can automatically inherit that level of sensitivity label for the meeting. Detecting sensitive content on the screen. So this is actually screen sharing and AI reviewing the screen, sharing to see sensitive content and notifying people in the meeting that something sensitive has been shared.

And one time password for meeting guest join. So this is an optional feature, but if you turn it on when someone comes is join the meeting, they'll be emailed a one time passcode and they must put that in to continue. 

Also some big events announcements. Intelligent recap is coming to events, so that's webinars and town halls. That's really nice. We've got the same summary capabilities we're used to in meetings and calls today. Town Hall has supports up to 50,000 users today, and we just saw on the roadmap that's going to a hundred thousand users in May.

So that's capability to do some really gIlyant broadcast scenarios. All native on teams, separate policies to control meeting, transcription and recording for town halls and webinars, . You might want to allow those capabilities in town hall webinars, but not in general meetings or vice versa.

. An ability to specifically end webinars for attendees, but have presenters return to the green room, which is just a nice touch. I do a lot of webinars. You kind of want to end it and then do a post review in the green room, and also the ability to post and reply to questions 

as a generic organizer rather than as your actual display name. Some events, people don't wanna have a particular display name replying. 

. Onto another one of the big announcements in the keynote. This is the ability to have facilitator agent on teams rooms. So specifically being able to have facilitator activated in a room scenario for an ad hoc meeting or an impromptu in person meeting. So everybody's in person.

You use the QR code and you can use the Microsoft Teams Rooms to take notes of that in person meeting, 

Something Ilya talked about in the keynote is actually the facilitator agent having the ability to take in the video feed of the meeting as well. Let's see what he said about that. It was really interesting.

Just the other day, in one of our early ring rooms, we walked in and my colleague Kim put her big water bottle on the table. With facilitator now having use of the camera, It actually commented and said, Wow, that's a lot of water. Good on you for staying hydrated. Not a single line of code was written for that.

It can now see if the room is messy and suggest a different room. It can see if there are too many people in the room and suggest a different room. My favorite, this is the bane of my existence for 10 years working on Teams rooms. It can see if someone put a chair right in front of the camera and nicely ask you to move that chair because seeing is so important for the meeting.

So that facilitator agent in teams rooms, preview should be coming next quarter for Windows and Android. 

Other teams rooms, updates. We've got occupancy status on teams, panels based on sensors in the room. 

Teams rooms, pro management portal, Microsoft are consolidating the management of teams rooms over to the pro portal. So those with basic and standard license rooms. Previously, they've now access to the pro portal. Now all that work will move over to the pro portal and eventually teams, rooms, Admin center won't have that room management capability.

Microsoft also talked about on stage having AI assistant in the pro management portal, so this is an AI assistant to allow you to do things like query the status of your rooms or which are my busiest rooms. That should be interesting. 

We didn't get a lot of hardware announcements, but Cisco did announce they're bringing Apple AirPlay to Cisco MTR, which I think is really cool. No ETA on that yet. 

And also Enterprise Connect marks the first year since RTM for MDEP, and the second year since the announcement, which was also at Enterprise Connect and MDEP had the 2025.1 release, their first release of 2025. I talked to Yoav on the MDEP team about devices that are now in market and what the roadmap looks like for 2025.

Great conversation. If you're interested in MDEP and devices, go and check that out Onto places. 

Places and teams are becoming a much tighter conversation. So we are getting ad hoc individual desk bookings. That's GA in April. Now really that's a teams feature. That's the ability to plug in a device, a shared device, and have an individual desk booked for that user. Room recommender, which is part of places.

This is a really clever feature. This has the ability to understand if two people are in the same building and they're about to join a meeting, I. It can see the meetings coming. It knows their physical presence through teams and places, and it can recommend, Hey, there's two of you meeting. Here's an available room.

Why don't you proactively meet together in person in this same room?. A nice one on presence and when Microsoft talk about presence these days, they're not just talking about busy free red green, they're also talking about physical presence.

So with places it will be able to use the wifi access point to understand where you are and put your location IE floor three based on the access point into teams, which is nice . And also related to all this new location information you can use at nearby in the teams client to instant message everybody nearby you.

So based on their location and your location. So for example, does anyone want to run out for a coffee? What do we wanna do for lunch? Really clever capability to dynamically instant message, just the people around you. And that is coming in April. 

Onto Team's phone. . The biggest announcement Enterprise Connect for Teams probably was teams phone extensibility, and this is the ability to have contact centers, so Microsoft Dynamics 365, and other certified contact centers, leverage teams phone.

For essentIlyally integration and connectivity. So you're using Team's phone for PSTN numbers, for number management, for number assignments, and that will seamlessly push through to your contact center of choice. So be that operator connect, direct routing or calling plan. And what this is using under the covers is Azure Communication Services.

To do that integration effectively, this is the teams certified contacts into power model. In that connect, extend power certification

dynamics 365 contact center will have this in April. Some of the ISVs have already been doing this and we'll be doing more of this. , Anywhere365 AudioCodes, ComputerTalk, Enghouse IP dynamics, Landis and Luware, 

were the ones named as going through the certification process, and I talked to Gidi AudioCodes and Matt at Landis to get their thoughts and understandings of this new certification 

beyond the team's phone extensibility, we did see some other teams phone updates, so Copilot in calls without transcription or recording. We've already seen this in meetings, so if your organization doesn't like transcription, doesn't like recording, you can still substantIlyate, Copilot for the duration of the phone call.

Using Copilot for a summary during transferring call. So in this scenario you can press the transfer, you can press the generator summary, and along with the transfer, a summary of the call so far will be sent to the person you're transferring to, which is a nice touch cues. Again, we've talked about this before, but barge, whisper, monitor, and takeover are coming in April and PSTN call extensibility. We talked about this before on the roadmap. This is now ga, I haven't seen you using this yet, but this is the ability to have app extensibility for the calling window in a teams phone scenario.

So think things like CRM, that could literally be in teams phone. Extended like we have extensions for meetings today.

Even more teams phone updates, so we've talked about this before is coming, but SMS in US and Canada, Microsoft calling plans is now generally available. . Teams phone Mobile, Vodafone has now launched in the UK and Germany, 

still waiting on VMO2 AT&T, and I think there's more due as well. So I'll be keeping an eye on that. And on physical phone devices, we've got line keys on phone with touchscreen. And we've got line key support for shared lines and call transfers and also Yealink, were at the show demoing their IP phones, running MDEP, which will be probably the first MDEP teams phones

if you wanna dive into more thoughts and opinions from Enterprise Connect. I caught up with quite a lot of people during the show. Be sure to check out those interviews. Looking to upcoming events. We've got quite a lot coming. So we've got Jeff Teper on the Copilot fireside chat.

Really looking forward to him sharing his thoughts on where we are with Copilot and be sure to bring your Copilot questions to that. 

We have Ilya doing teams fireside chat next month. Really looking forward to that. Again, bring your questions. Ilya is really great at answering all your questions. Comms vnext in person in Denver. I have two sessions there. Really looking forward to that.

A great gathering of everybody who's focused on Microsoft Teams. If you can make it highly recommended. Later on in April, we have the Microsoft UC User group, London, Cisco are hosting us. 

If you can get out to Vegas in May, the Microsoft 365 community conference has over 20 teams sessions. There's a whole teams track there, so that show has really got a big focus on teams this year. And looking a bit further out to June, we've got Commsverse. Great show. I've got a couple of sessions there, team show, but also incorporating Copilot and more of M365 as well. 

. So that is the update for March. Really hope it was useful for you. Again, many thanks to Pure IP for their support. We couldn't do this without our amazing benefactors. Lots of updates this month. If you've made it this far, I'd love to hear in the comments, which was the biggest update for you.

And if you've got any questions or comments, please do leave them below as well. Thanks a lot.