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 updates April, 2025. Many thanks to Neat who are the benefactor this month. Really appreciate all their support of Empowering Cloud. They have an awesome range of Teams, devices, also supporting Zoom, and recently announced coming is Google Meet as well. Lots to talk about this month.

There's plenty going on. I'm just off the back of comms V next, which was an awesome conference. Quite a lot of news in the devices space as well, so let's get stuck straight in. 

First up, let's have a look at the latest on Empowering Cloud. We've got a great briefing from Rolf on SharePoint online, advance Management, worth checking out, and also some podcast updates. We dived into the queues app with Scott Plet. We went through the kind of what's the features are and some of the roadmap.

We talked about the future of collaboration with Greg at HP and dived into his history in Microsoft Teams, which is obviously very extensive. And we talked about Copilot in the legal sector with Matt peers, that was really interesting. He's global, COO of Princeton, Mateen. Really interesting perspective on Copilot and AI in the legal sector, 

if you haven't seen it already, it was Enterprise Connect last month and Ilya's keynote is now online. I did a speed edit of it, managed to connect to just under 15 minutes, and you can see a big list there of all the features that were shown and covered and whether they're GA, preview or roadmap. If you wanna see everything that was in the keynote as fast as I could get it, do check that video out.

Link above.

Our first bit of new news and a really important one for Teams, admins Teams are going to start blocking clients older than 90 days from accessing the service. Microsoft have always said, per the SLA, it's a cloud service. You need to keep your clients updated, but it hasn't traditionally been enforced.

Now it will be enforced, so starting 11th of April for Windows users and starting 6th of May for Mac users. Users are first going to get this kind of banner warning them that they're not updated and the hope is that we'll ping them to ping their admin and get updated to see what's wrong. And finally, they will get blocked.

You can see the example here for VDI on this side, but VDI, but also it'll be the same for regular Teams clients as well. Check out that MCID for more information and we've seen on the roadmap reports coming that will help us understand. Where clients are in terms of their update lifecycle as well.

General channel is back by popular demand. So a few months ago on the update, I told you that general channel was going away and Microsoft were going to stop you having a new first channel called General. Now it is back. So you can have that first channel be called General. You can also name it whatever you want.

. Previously you had to name it something different. It couldn't be general. Now it can be general or it cannot be general. 

And if you've previously renamed the general channel, you can take it back to that general name as well. Lots of organizations have got really used to the general being their default channel, so nice to see Microsoft listening to customers and giving all the options there. This is a really cool one.

I think. This is checking screen, sharing content for sensitive material, 

so literally being able to read what's on the screen and look for things like social security numbers or credit card numbers, and alert the presenters in the meeting. Something's been shared that maybe shouldn't have been shared.

This is a team's premium feature that'll be rolling out June, July, and I think it'll be on by default as well. So no admin action here. Really nice addition to the service. Next up sharing PowerPoint controls with all presenters. Concurrently, we've all been in the meeting or probably multiple meetings where we are using PowerPoint Live, and one person has control and they have to share control to the next, or another presenter is moving themselves forward because they don't understand that they're not moving the deck for the entire new group.

They're moving themselves personally. So with this new feature, all presenters will concurrently control a single deck and they'll all be able to move it back and forward. So there's no kind of need to handover control. 

A really nice quality of life update. And that is rolling out June, 

and a bit of a rename here in the team certification. You will have heard me last month talk about Teams phone extensibility, which was announced at Enterprise Connect. And that's the technology allowing contact center vendors, including Dynamics 365, and the certified ISVs to tightly integrate Teams through the Azure Communication services.

That was called the Power Model. In terms of certification, we had Power Extend and Connect. That's now being renamed the Unify model. So there's still Teams phone extensibility. That's the technology that the contact centers are using and other things might use in the future. But when they go to Certify, there will be certifying as a unified contact center.

No contact centers have been certified yet. Those six announced last month are working through that program, and I'll be keeping a close eye on who gets certified first. There's also been a lot of work done on the Microsoft Docs page, and you can now see the Unified Contact Center definition and you can see who's certified for which certification, so who's Connect, who's extend, and who's Unify, which previously you couldn't see on the main docs page.

So really nice update from the Docs team there 

stay posted. I'm talking to a number of the Teams working on the Teams phone extensibility and the unified certification, and I'll have more news as both the Dynamics 365 team do more and those ISVs get certified as well.

Another important contact center update. This is really interesting. The extend contact centers, route a telephone number into a bot and then route that number onto a, or that call onto a user, and there was no enforcement of that end user needing a team's phone license. They always did from a documentation point of view, and they always did from a license requirements point of view, but it wasn't enforced.

Microsoft are now going to enforce that. So calls coming in PSTN calls coming into extend contact centers or attendant consoles if the call is gonna be forwarded onto a user. That team's user must have a Teams' phone license. That's really important. If you're using Extend Contact center. Make sure all your users that are related to the contact center do have a Teams' phone license.

They already should. That was the standard. That's what the good vendors would say you needed to do. But be aware of this, particularly if you're using Extend Contact and just go and double check. All the calls that are rooting from the contact center, those end users do have that Teams phone license. And if you need more information, talk to your ISV who's certified for contact Center, or you can see the link here, which has all the details from the team.

We've had a couple of updates on Teams phone, mobile. Nice to see that. Slowly filling out recently, Talia have added Finland and they're the first provider covering four countries. If you wanna see all the details, we have a Power BI report on empowering cloud access, open to all the community to track what's going on with both operator connect and Teams phone, mobile, and filter, and see all the coverage as well.

I had a really good conversation recently with Adam Holtby on the podcast, who's a principal analyst at Omdia all around mobile and UCaaS integration and why maybe Teams phone mobile and the other UCaaS mobile integrations haven't taken off, and how we feel about it for the future as well. So if you're interested in that, check that out on the Teams Insider podcast.

feed. 

Just one big update in the copilot world this month, but a really important one starting in May. Microsoft are going to pin M365 copilot chat, so that's the free version included with all your office 365, Microsoft 365 enter accounts. That is going to be pinned in Outlook and pinned in Teams, and this is just making it more visible for end users. 

It's not giving them the full M 365 copilot capabilities. So it doesn't mean it can reach into their SharePoint docs or their OneDrive docs or their emails or their Teams chat. It's just an essentially an I frame in Teams through to the copilot chat.

Tom: It's a nice way to get that tool, more visibility, and I think a lot of organizations haven't made the most of that being free and in the box. So essentially you've got a kind of ChatGPT like service, but enterprise secured with Microsoft all tied your Enter ID. If you don't want that, you can definitely turn it off as an admin and there are details there in the mc to check out where you can set the policy to say we would rather not have those pinned in Outlook and or Teams.

On Devices news. First up, I think I've talked about this before on the roadmap, but now we've got a fuller blog post on it and an MCID Teams Rooms on Windows Management, whether they're pro licensed or basic, or the old standard license. All that management is moving over to the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro portal, so all that management will be in one place rather than being tech.

It's coming over in May, and you'll no longer be able to manage Teams rooms on windows after June the first on the Teams admin center. Same thing is planned for Android. No timelines yet, but eventually all room management will be in the room propo rather than in tech. And it doesn't mean that basic or standard, the old legacy license will get more management capabilities.

They'll broadly have the same very basic management capabilities. They do 'cause their team doing basic license, but just all the manageability will be in one place.

So that's a good one for your operations Teams to make sure they understand that change is coming. AOSP continues to roll out and more and more certified firmwares that are A SOP compatible have been released. There's an important date, which is 15th of May, and that is when Microsoft will start proactively pushing out the firmware updates.

So they'll push out in the standard rings, the validation general and final rings that are dear to those timelines. But these updates won't be pausible. So make sure if you haven't already, and I've been talking about this for months, make sure your Intune is configured to allow these AOSP firmwares to work.

Make sure you test a couple of rooms and keep an eye on the blog post there for details of when your devices firmware be rolling through. A lot of them have come through now. Some are GA already, but more are coming through into May and June time as well.

As well as those AOSP updates. There's some other important updates happening as well on the devices and the Android side, Microsoft put together this single slide to help you understand all these different updates and the dates that are coming. And if you download the deck, you can click the links to each of these blogs and more information pages as well.

But as always, with Teams rooms on Windows and Teams rooms on Android, make sure you're on top of these updates. Make sure you understand what's coming and make sure you are configured to make the most of them. Lastly on the BYOD front, we've got a new policy setting to be aware of. It's a new PowerShell setting for speaker attribution, BYOD, and as the name suggests, this is the ability for BYOD scenarios.

To use speaker attribution still requires a Microsoft 3 6 5 copilot license and a premium license. It is enabled by default, but if admins prefer, they can disable it.

There's a lot of work being done to bring these AI capabilities to BYOD. So nice to see those coming through now. Okay, let's have a quick look at the roadmap. There were 26 new items in the last 30 days. If you want to check it out on the uh, change pilot portal, you can see the Power BI report and slice and dice it as you wish.

Some key updates are automatically setting your work location via wifi network, which is coming in June. The app mention in Teams based on your location also coming in June, that detecting sensitive content that I mentioned that hit the message center has also hit the roadmap. Face recognition in Microsoft Teams rooms on windows using cloud Intelliframe.

So obviously we've had framing before but this is now face recognition to understand who is in the meeting, which is really nice. Call quality reports for BYOD in the pro management portal.

. I believe that still needs the shared device license on every BYOD room to get that reporting. I'm digging into that at the moment.

And as I said earlier, a bunch of other smaller updates, but those are the big ones that have come new to the roadmap this month. Let's have a quick look at events. There's still a lot going on. We are fully into event season. 

I've got a webinar coming up with AudioCodes, which I'm looking forward to, which is all about transforming meetings into valuable business assets, so using Gen AI to take the content out of meetings and make it useful. . We've got Copilot Fireside chat coming up. Looking forward to that. We've got the in-person Microsoft UC group, London at the end of the month. Then start of next month. We've got the M365 Community conference, still tickets available for that. Looks like a really exciting event, and Microsoft have put a lot of Teams content into that event as well, so check that out.

Jamie Stark, awesome person, well known in our space. He's working on Teams phone, , and he's going to be on the Teams fireside chat in May. . We've got the Converge Communications Partner Technical bootcamp that is online and available to partners to go through all your Teams rooms and Teams phone, and a bit of Copilot thrown in there as well.

We've, of course, got the regular Microsoft Teams device ask us anything, , I'm really looking forward to doing a Ribbon sponsored webinar with Kevin Kieller, where we're gonna talk about survivability in the cloud and actually compare Survival branch appliance to the equivalent solutions from Zoom and WebEx as well.

So looking at how these different cloud solutions support survivability and from a team's point of view, understanding what the survival branch appliance brings to the party. It'd be great to see you at those events. As always, you can find all the registration details at eventsempowering.cloud.

So that's it for this month. Thanks again to Neat for all their support of everything we do at Empowering.Cloud. We really appreciate it. Hope that update's been useful for you. If you've got any questions or comments, please do drop them below. Otherwise, hope to see you at one of the events or see you next month.

Thanks a lot.