Teams Update May 2025

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 Arbuthnot: Microsoft Teams monthly update. May, 2025. Many thanks to AudioCodes who are the benefactor this month at Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate all their support of everything we're doing in the community. AudioCodes will be at Commsverse next month, and I'll be there, so looking forward to catching up with them there.

Also, AudioCodes recently announced Meeting Insights OnPrem, so Meeting Insights is their solution that can join Teams meetings and pull out insights and also other platforms. And now they have an on-prem version, which can actually pull insights from. PBX is fully run on-prem air gap. really interesting solutions for those customers who need a dedicated on-premAIinsight solution.

Lots to talk about this month. We have had Microsoft earnings. We've had Microsoft Build, so lots of news there. An EU antitrust update, nine roadmap highlights are pulled out for the month so let's get stuck right in. If you haven't seen the latest from Empowering Cloud, we've got quite a lot going on at the moment. We've just posted an expert briefing on BYOD with Randy and Chris going into everything Microsoft are doing in the BYOD space.

Also, how the licensing lines up and considerations if you're looking at BYOD solution. I also talked to Gordon at Ribbon, who took me through their latest Edge, 8500 That Is the big boy in the Edge, SBC series, and we talk about why some environments still need edge solutions and also how that is a modular solution.

On the pod. I think we've had some really good conversations. Recently. We dived into gong'sAIintegration into Microsoft Teams, and that's riding on Numonix's TRaaS service to pull out the insights I talked Reto at SCOR about rolling out 200 Teams rooms in just 90 days. Really interesting project. Massive rollout with Neat there. Also, compliance. Recording again with Michael at Numonix's talking about how the market is, how the certification works. That was really interesting.

Bookable desks, a hot topic with Evie Grimshaw. We talked about how that works and how that comes together. Uh, so let's have a quick look at Microsoft earnings. I always like to look at the earnings calls to see what's being said and also what's not being said and what products are in favor, mainly with a Microsoft 365 enterprise point of view revenue was at 70.1 billion exceeding expectations, so massive revenue.

The cloud revenue was up 20%, so that's Azure M365, commercial Dynamics, et cetera. A lot of that driven by Azure andAIspend. We believe Microsoft announced there's now 430 million paid M365 slash Office 365 seats, which is up from, the last number we got was 400 million in Q2 FY 24. That's 7% year over year, and the revenue for commercial cloud also increased 12%.

So big increases across the board in the cloud, M365 space, and Microsoft said that was about E5. So they're increasing the ARPU through E5 and Copilot attach. Also, they said they've seen an increase in small and medium business and frontline worker SKUs as well.

We didn't get any new numbers on Teams or Teams Premium or Teams phone. Onto Microsoft Build. Now Microsoft Build is a developer conference, so not quite in the M365 enterprise space, but it's really interesting to see how the technologies overlap. And obviously with all the stuff going on with ai, that kind of spans M365 and development as well.

So some of the highlights you might be interested in, they talked about Copilot tuning. So this is the ability to use Copilot and Copilot studio. Add your own enterprise data and tune up the models. Multi-agent orchestration, so taking multiple agents and making them work together in a workflow. Again, really interesting options for low code and pro code.

And two big themes were Microsoft have heavily endorsed the adopted MCP, which is the model context protocol. And this is a standard that was originally from Anthropic that Open AI have backed, and now Microsoft have backed. 

It's essentially a wrapper around APIs to standardize how AI Agents work with APIs, and you are already seeing a lot of adoption, either products putting in their own MCP wrapper or third parties writing community MCP wrappers for APIs.

All of this kind of culminated in this concept that Microsoft put forward about the Open Agentic web. They presented NLWeb as a potential standard to allow websites to make themselves directly accessible to agents, essentially taking an existing website or an API and making it into an agentic application to make it more accessible for the agents.

. Really exciting to see Copilot adopting MCP. Copilot will be able to reach out to third party services interact with them, proactively take actions, and it all kind of culminates in this idea of having agents doing work for you.

Okay. Onto the Microsoft Teams news. So first up, we got an update on the Microsoft and EU antitrust case. For those not familiar, we've been talking about this for a while. Essentially, slack put in a complaint that it was anti-competitive, that Microsoft could bundle Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

, And that led to Microsoft Unbundling Teams from Office 365 and Microsoft 365. So for new customers today, if they buy Microsoft 365 or Office 365, they buy that and they buy the Teams skew on top, which is $5 for the Teams enterprise license.

The EU have said that wasn't enough. Microsoft have gone back again and said, potentially we propose it would increase the price gap between. The Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites and Teams potentially they're saying that could be $9 difference rather than the $5 difference. They'll hold that line for seven years and they'll commit to bigger interoperability with third party platforms for another 10 years as well.

Now the EU Commission are going back and assessing if that's enough or if they potentially are going to push forward with antitrust case and potentially a fine of up to 10% of global annual turnover. Huge numbers at risk here.

Onto the Microsoft Teams roadmap. Lots of really interesting announcements. This month I pulled out nine that I think are the highlights. First up, intelligent recap will incorporate shared content on the screen. So essentially the AI will routinely scrape the screen for content and bring that into the AI summary.

This is a huge one for me because it was a big gap. If people are presenting decks and content, the AI summary is getting the transcript, it's getting the audio, but it's not getting that content. So with this, we'll bridge that gap. Interactive agents coming into calls and meetings.

This is the potential to engage with bots in real time, in calls and in meetings.

That's coming. June, replying to a specific message in a channel thread and essentially breaking it out into a new thread. So you know when you get a long thread and you want to break something out, now you can do a special reply and break it out into a new thread that's coming June, sharing files in one-to-one and group chats with external users.

Something I know that causes us a lot of pain. We're constantly collaborating with external people on chats and it's a bit fussy to go and generate a OneDrive link.

So this will feel more natural to users to share. It'll be super interesting to see what the policy control around this is. 'cause I know a lot of people. want that to be carefully controlled. I imagine it's going to upload to OneDrive on the sharers side and also set permissions, but we'll see audio summaries of meetings.

Really excited for this one. This is taking one or more meeting transcripts, selecting them and having Copilot generate a audio summary of what happened in the meeting. So potentially you can pick a meeting, but you could pick two or three or four meetings. Have it generate the transcript and listen back.

So think on your drive into the office or your drive home. Quick summary of that meeting.

A couple for phone. So first up is the ability to use Copilot interactively during a phone call without having transcription turned on. some organizations don't want to transcribe calls, but with this policy, Copilot will still work interactively during the call session. So you can ask questions of what's been said so far.

Get to recap the conversation so far, but it's not storing a transcript of that entire call. And also call waiting beep. We've had Teams for eight years now, but apparently we've got to the point where we're going to add the call waiting beep, that's the in-ear beep. When a second call is coming into Teams, I definitely won't be turning that on.

Not for me. Happy to have a toast, but don't want a beep in my ear. But evidently some people do want that call. Waiting. Beep.

One very specific one to call out classic Teams is ending availability, meaning it will stop working and stop signing in on the 1st of July. If you've got the message, 1 0 7 4 9 7 0 in your tenant, that means you've specifically been targeted for that message to say there are still people in your tenant using classic Teams.

Most users should be upgraded by now. They will have been also upgraded, but there are some users that are stuck. Maybe they're behind a proxy or a firewall that's not letting them update, or there's something else about their machine that's blocking it. So do check for that message to make sure all your users are updated because come the 1st of July, they will be cut off from the service.

And this one is probably the roadmap highlight. Got a huge engagement on LinkedIn. Lots of people are excited about this. This is a network strength indicator for everybody in the team's call or meeting. 

so it shows network connectivity and means that, in the meeting who's got a good connection and who's got a less good connection. So no more, I'm unsure. Is it your end? Is it my end? We'll be able to see who has connectivity issues, and if you do have connectivity issues, the team's client will also give tips to that person to help 'em understand how they can mitigate it, maybe turn off their video, for example.

That will be a great quality of life update. And that is coming August

on the Operator Connect 

and Teams phone, mobile side, not loads of movement. We have seen a couple of carriers added, so we're now at 109 carriers, 106 countries covered, 8x8 have been on absolute tear adding countries. They're now up to 50 countries covered and 

Also Vodafone and now VMO2 are available in the UK for Teams phone mobile. So the UK is the first network with three operators available for Teams. Phone, mobile. 

on Teams, VDI, Microsoft did a really nice roundup of all the recent updates and investments in Teams. VDI niche use case, but if you've got it, you're really gonna appreciate some of these updates. I won't go through every single one, but you can see they've added some pretty core 

functionality there, including enhanced monitoring for cool quality and diagnostics, which is a really good one. And screen capture protection as well. If your organization are using Teams and VDI check out the blog for more details.

another interesting blog on the Microsoft Teams blog. Microsoft shared two sets of test results where Teams was tested against other uc platforms for things like echo cancellation and noise expression, and Teams came out on top.

Pretty much across the board, they've shared the actual results of those reports and also summarize them in the blog.

Last up, if you are a Microsoft partner, Microsoft places have released a technical solutions exam. Much like we get on the Teams rooms, technical exams, but this is places specific 

There is a learning path on the partner portal and you can log into expert zone and take the exam and get your badge as well. 

onto devices news. First up, we've got a big may update for Microsoft Teams rooms on Android. We've got speaker recognition coming in. That's a huge one for me. A preview of facilitator in the room, PTZ controls on the room controls, and a whole bunch of other updates as well.

Graham Walsh has done a really good YouTube video going through all the updates, so if you want to get the details, check it out, link there. 

Also the docs link is there as well

we're just coming up to InfoComm, so there'll be a lot of device announcements next month. I know there's quite a lot coming there, but we did get some device news this month. Logitech have their new entry level small Teams room system, hitting a list price point of $2,300.

It's a MeetUp 2, with all the MeetUp 2 goodness and a tap with a USB direct connection, five meters Lenovo mini PC I three computer as well. So this is Logitech coming in with one of those smaller, more cost effective Microsoft team rooms on Windows for smaller rooms.

 also I noticed that MAXHUB's first Android MDEP devices went onto the certified list. No real details about those at the moment, but I imagine they'll be talking more about those at InfoComm. So that is another vendor in the MDEP devices space as well. In terms of devices roadmap, we saw a few interesting ones.

Line keys are going to be controllable for Teams, physical IP phones from the Teams admin center from July. That's really useful for admins who want to remotely set line keys. Cloud video interop details are going to be added to town hall invites, so that will give the ability for people to join on standards based, video conferencing rooms into a town hall.

Also on Town Hall, we now have the ability to join town halls and webinars from a Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, that's been a bit of a pain point. You have a big town hall, you've got a great room with an MTR, but you can't join the town hall and have a few people sitting there and all listen to it at the same time.

That problem is now solved on Teams Rooms, on Windows, and also we're getting call quality reports. For BYOD devices in the pro portal, that's all the key Teams news. If you do want to get into more detail, Martin Boam does two awesome decks that are a really great resource. What's new in calls, meetings, and devices, and also what's new in Copilot. Those are not just for partners. Customers can get to those links as well.

So if you wanna see a really nice deck with all the items in calling, meeting and devices and Copilot, do check those out

onto events. We are fully in event season. It is all Go. InfoComm is obviously coming up very soon in the us That's a big devices show. I'm not there in person, but I have been having some sessions getting the news and there'll be a lot from there. I'm gonna do some remote videos as well,

in the UK we have Commsverse coming up. Great Teams community show. I've got a few sessions there. Really looking forward to that. If you are in the uk highly recommend that one. That's a great one. Teams fireside chat. We've got Michael and Hab coming up talking about facilitator and AI in Microsoft Teams.

Webinar wise, I've got a great webinar coming with Kevin Kieller all around cloud phone survivability, and we're gonna compare Microsoft Teams in this Survival Branch appliance with what Zoom do and what WebEx do see the pros and cons of each platform. And also looking forward to doing a session with Randy from Logitech.

We're going to talk about the full Logitech portfolio as it relates for a Microsoft Teams customer. 

so that's it for this month. Many thanks to AudioCodes for their support. I hope that update was useful. If it was please do like and share it. That really helps spread the word. Any questions, comments, or feedback you've got, please do leave them below. Thanks a lot. I.