Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is a bonus show. This is my monthly update of all the news. You need to know. This goes out as a video on the Empowering.Cloud site, and you can also grab the full PowerPoint deck there. But we also post the audio here for people who want to catch up with their own audio. Hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the Microsoft Teams monthly update, June, 2025. Many thanks to Landis Technologies who are the benefactor Empowering.Cloud this month. Really appreciate all their support. Just last week, Landis launched their new Unify model contact center, one of the first contact centers running on the new ACS model.

we'll be talking more about that later on in the update. Also, be sure to check them out at Commsverse this week. if you're interested in the new contact center models, go to landis technologies.com to check out more. So onto the updates, plenty to talk about. Mainly InfoComm.

We had the big InfoComm devices show, AV show last week. Lots of teams, devices, news there. We've also got some teams phone updates. We've got some new capabilities to pull diagnostic logs and a really big change to teams channel layouts. So let's jump in. First up, if you haven't been on Empowering.Cloud lately, we've had a bit of a site refresh.

We've got some new briefings up there including mastering teams queues app in which we live, demo the new Barge and Whisper capabilities.

Also a new briefing with ribbon on their new Edge, 8,500, which is the big boy modular SBC of their edge range. . On the podcast, we had some great pods lately. Deep dive on MDEP with Chris Johnson, which was really interesting, both where MDEP is today and where it's going.

Teams phone mobile with Duncan Finley from VM O2 I also jumped on the AudioCodes podcast to talk about the new teams phone extensibility and unified contact center models, and you can check all that out on the links over there.

First some really big news for our space and Microsoft 365. In general, there's been some big leadership changes. This is just ahead of the new Microsoft Financial year,

Previous to this there were two different business units. There was the M365 Copilot business unit, and the business and industries Copilot, which is more the kind of dynamic C sideof the house power platform, et cetera. That has changed now, 

the LinkedIn, CEO, which LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Ryan Rolansky is taking an expanded role and he'll also be executive vice president of office. Interesting terminology there. 'cause office is not something we normally talk about. We talk about Microsoft 365. In this context it's word, Excel, PowerPoint, and critically Microsoft 365 Copilot.

So he will take on that responsibility in addition to LinkedIn 

And he'll be reporting up to Rajesh Jha, who's EVP of experience and Devices, similarly, Charles Lamana, who runs the business and industry Copilot team, will also be moved closer to Microsoft 365 and also reporting into Rajesh Jha.

this is really good news for Microsoft Copilot. I think it might create more continuity between those different business units, but interesting to see some pretty big changes right at the top. on the consumer Copilot, that will still be run by Mustafa Suleyman.

nothing's changed there, so I'll be keeping a close eye on this. It'll be interesting to see over the coming financial year for Microsoft what this changes in terms of Copilot and M365 strategy.

Next up a pretty big change for channels and how they work. We're going to have two layout options for channels. The classic posts layout, which is the layout you're used to, where you start a post at the bottom of the page, and the post has every reply as a threaded message in the replies, and essentially each thread is within the channel.

And a new layout called Threads, which is much more chat like. The bottom of the window will be starting a new chat, and then you can reply to the chat and that will create threads. this won't change by default. This will be an option on a per channel basis, and you can Admin control it if you prefer.

Let's have a look at what that looks like. So This is the classic layout. you see at the bottom of the page you have the new post, and then people can reply to the posts. The theory here is there might be a bit of friction because it's different to chat.

You have to really think about, I want to create a new post, whereas the new model, new threaded channel layout, now, you'll see it has just a text box at the bottom. typing into the text will create a new message and you can have a more chat like experience, if you reply to the individual threads, where the arrow is, that will create a threaded chat off the back of that chat message.

this sidebar here, when you click onto a thread, we'll show you the replies in that thread. So very different philosophy about how collaboration is done. Is it more formally in kind of a a forum type model? Or is it more ad hoc and I can choose to reply and create a thread for each message or not.

Now, there's some Slack users that prefer this kind of chat centric model. It's been coming for a long while, so interesting to have both options. There are Admin controls around this, but by default this will ship on for users, and this is what it looks like in the channel settings for a channel Admin.

They can flip from one model to the other as well.

that is due to be coming in August. Check out the message center for more details on the specifics and how to Admin control it as well.

I talked about this in the intro. This is teams phone extensibility. this is what the new Unify, certified, or to be certified, Contact centers will be based on, this allows. deep integration between teams phone and the contact center. So essentially you can use direct routing and operate a connect to route numbers through to the contact center.

So you don't need to manage two types of connectivity. Agent calls can be routed either to the classic teams client or to a dedicated CCaaS application, Again, this is the capability and Unify is the certification. A ISV will go through to get their contact center certified as a unify contact center using Azure Communication services,

this is one I'm really excited about. For administrators, this is the ability to remotely pull client logs for teams, windows and Mac from the Teams Admin Center. So if users are having issues previously, you had somehow get to their desktop, grab the logs, and pull 'em back either physically with somebody there or some kind of remote tooling.

This will allow logs to be collected at any user interaction. There are some privacy considerations here that you should think through. but look at the message center message for more details. And this is coming between June and July. We'll make a massive difference for admins. I'm just about to do a podcast with a customer who has over a hundred thousand users, and we talk through some of these Teams, Admin Center changes.

what a difference they make to day-to-day Admin of large environments.

We've seen a couple more operator connect providers since last month. We are now up to 111 providers covering 106 countries. Interestingly, AudioCodes have also certifiedtheir AudioCodes live platform for partner solution. This is an opportunity for partners to use live platform and have their end customers use operator Connect for connectivity as well,

another important update. If you're running Survival branch appliances, be sure to get those updated. There's a change coming infrastructure side with Microsoft, and that means that SBA versions before February, 2025 will stop working at September the first, 2025. So you've got a bit of a window here to update.

you get updates for SBAs directly from your SBA provider. So reach out to AudioCodes Ribbon Oracle or TE Systems depending on who your SBA is. 

recently, I did a webinar with Kevin Keeler on survivability, and we talked all through SBA. There'll be a link to that later in the show.

Another big change. Microsoft are retiring the semi-annual enterprise. Office 365 or Microsoft 365 desktop apps version. So this was the version where you get a major update for your users every six months. So you kind of could stall all the incremental changes, let them build up and do a big change for your users.

In terms of features and functionality, quite a few enterprises went on this just to not have to deal with the regular change of the apps that is going away. I mean, it will still exist, but it's being reserved for non attended scenarios where frequent updates are not practical. So Microsoft are really, really dissuading you using this for end users, and for end users.

The monthly channel will now support NN minus one N minus two builds. So you'll have some control of kind of rolling out different builds or channels within the Enterprise Channel if you want to stagger that rollout.

But the bottom line here is all the enterprise customers are going to have to move their users to the monthly enterprise channel, and they will be getting more regular updates. Check out the Message Center message for more details And the Learn page has quite a lot of good detail about this change.

Onto the device news from InfoComm, a whole wave of device news. Firstly, independent of InfoComm, Android 10 and Android 11 certified device dates have been extended again.

They extended from September the third, 2025 to September 3rd, 2026, meaning they'll be in that certified state for another year. there's still a few Android 10 11 devices . I think the AOSP stuff has taken a bit longer than we anticipated as well, so that gives us bit more of a support stream while things change there.

The actual end of support remains the same, September 3rd, 2027. So the end of support has not been extended, but the end of certification has.

Also on Android. Yet another reminder that you must be updating these devices. Microsoft are changing the way authentication works. They're moving to a new intra token based authentication. You do need to be on these minimum versions to support that new authentication.

At the end of July, devices on those app versions will automatically switch and support the new authentication method. Devices on unsupported versions will still work for a while, and by September 30th, 2025, all devices must be on that minimum app version.

So once again, we've talked about this before. Really important to ensure all those Android devices, your Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, but also your phones, your panels, your displays are all regularly updating and aligned to the right update channels for your environment.

Onto InfoComm. It was definitely a multi-camera multistream scenario for some of the announcements. Neat demoed two Neat centers in play. I did a live video with Graham remotely from InfoComm. He gave me the demo of that. Also well done to meet the Neat Board Pro was named Best In Show, award winner at InfoComm as well.

And Logi similarly, were demoing Multistream on teams. That's multiple concurrent streams from the devices. And Daisy chaining two Logitech sights into a room to create eight simultaneous video streams. Great to see these new camera options and multi-camera options coming through.

Really exciting opportunities to improve the experience, particularly for the remote user. A whole bunch of Microsoft's MDEP News. check out the MDEP podcast again with Chris. If you wanna dive into what MDEP is and where Microsoft are going with it. It's a new Android OS from Microsoft. You can see the list of OEMs that have picked it up and launched devices.

Yealink had another device. The new video bar 50 

Jabra showed their upcoming PanaCast 40. I have a podcast coming up with Ollie from Jabra where he talks about the device portfolio and what's coming from Jabra. look out for that on Teams Insiders. Soon, MAXHUB unveiled their video bar X 50, which is MDEP and MDEP. Also announced partnerships for digital signage.

So this is the first time we're seeing MD depth come outta just the team's devices realm into digital signage, which was interesting. The MDEP team also previewed their new release, which will be an Android 15 based release. that will be their next major update and there's a blog from them with complete details of what that update will be coming with.

And Barco also announced their first MDEP ClickShare devices, the ClickShare Wireless Hub Video conferencing room system. This is a modular teams rooms on Android that also works with the ClickShare devices. they have a number of partnerships for audio and video peripherals.

the idea here is they're providing a modular Android solution with ClickShare And you can bring in some different certified video and audio bar solutions. We'll look out for those partnerships and certifications in due course.

Cisco also announced some new hardware. They launched the Vision PTZ camera and interestingly,didn't really get as much press as I thought it might. Cisco also showed nearly native room joining from RoomOS mode. So this is not Cisco rooms running in Microsoft Teams Rooms mode this is running in the RoomOS mode and when they join a Zoom meeting, they will pop up a Zoom experience and they'll pop that back down and go to RoomOS. So it is not running native in the sense of, it's not a Zoom room like Cisco run Microsoft Teams Rooms, but it's a meet, join experience that's slightly more native.

To zoom, really interesting to see Cisco here having abilities to join multiple platforms in room OS mode or in the Microsoft Teams Rooms mode. Cisco, can natively pop the WebEx experience

and then for interop, it's either guest join or cloud video interop Finally, Shure announced their IntelliMix Foundation system and the new loudspeaker system you can see here. And this is further expanding the portfolio of Shure team certified devices.

Lastly onto events. So we've got some great stuff coming up. We have comms verse this week as I record. Really looking forward to that. I've got quite a few talks there and there's a lot of people in the community. Copilot Fireside chat Coming up later in the month and next month. Teams fireside chat. We have Tracy, her, who is a very familiar facing the community, really great knowledge of teams and teams, troubleshooting and devices.

That'll be a really good session. we have a new webinar format coming. Let's Talk Teams live where we're bringing in a kind of fast-paced talk show format and we've got Microsoft and a partner there talking about teams recording and what's needed. Michael from Mnemonics is co-hosting for me on that one.

Also, if you missed it, I did the surviving a cloud phone outage with Kevin Kieller, where we compared survival Branch appliance and teams approach to Zoom and Webex as well. I think that was a really good session. Took a lot of research. It gave you a good overview of the resiliency capabilities of all three major platforms.

So if you're interested in that, there's a link to see the on demand as well. Once again, if you're in around the uk, check out Commsverse. This is just some of the Empowering.Cloud expert contributors that will be speaking at the show. It's a really well attended show and really great session, so looking forward to seeing everybody there.

That's it for this month. Hope this was a useful update for you. Thanks again to Landis for supporting everything we're doing. Do check out their new unified contact center and as always with the update, if you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, I do really want to hear them.

Please do leave the comments and I'll come back to you. Thanks a lot.