Tom Arbuthnot: 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 July, 2025. Many thanks to Pure ip, enterprise voice, part of BCM one for all their support of everything we're doing. Check them out for great coverage on operator Connect, direct routing and all your team's PSTN nexaeds lots to talk about. This month, it's the start of the new Microsoft Financial Year, so there's plenty going on there, which we'll dive into, but surprisingly, there's also quite a lot of feature news as well, both on teams and on Copilot.

So let's get stuck right in.

First up, if you haven't been on the site yet, we did a bit of a refresh recently and loads of good new content on there. Alistair at Pure IP enterprise Voice does lots of pro services around global projects, and it was really interesting to see how he broke down five different personas of teams, voice usage, and this new kind of persona of like a power user that sits somewhere between contact center and basic phone user

I had some great guests on the podcast really interesting conversation with Mehryn around her role in terms of teams, rooms and partner management and sales and what's coming in the new fy. Dan at ClickShare talking about their MDEP journey, which was really interesting and Olly at Jabra as well.

Talking about the latest with them and what's coming for them down the road. A bit of a roadmap preview from Olly. Also on the blog there was a teams phone rollout, keys to success, and a bit of a comparison. I get asked this question, a lot of teams phone Native versus the UCaaS plugins. short answer there is the UCaaS plugins have some pretty big limitations.

I explain what those are, how it works, and what the considerations are.

Okay, onto the news. It is Microsoft's new financial year. their financial year runs from July to June, so always around this time of year. There's lots of changes. Obviously there's been a massive impact. They've cut 9,000 rolls, which is about 4% of head counts.

really sorry to hear anybody who's been impacted by that and lots of people have. There's a lot of flux inside of Microsoft at the moment. Roles changing. Priorities changing. So we'll see how that settles down over the coming month. We haven't had the earnings yet.

We'll get the earnings at the end of July, the most important thing next is the partner kickoff, which is 22nd of July. this is the time when they give all the Microsoft partners the sense of direction for the coming year, their priorities.

Where the funding's going, what they're focused on. it was nice to see. We got teams, phone teams, rooms and teams, premiums, a call out on the modern work system, integrator track. Obviously I'll be absorbing all that on the 22nd and reporting back.

if you are a Microsoft partner, that's a great opportunity to understand where Microsoft's focus is for the coming year onto the teams news. first up, not actually teams, but skype for Business Server lives on. Skype for Business Server is now moving into a subscription edition.

The subscription edition is generally available. This is a cumulative update patch that doesn't really change anything about Skype server. But brings it into the ongoing subscription model support. 

Microsoft also increased the cost of server based product, so Exchange and Skype server both going up by 10% this month. And the CALs, the client access licenses are going up in August as well. So this moves Skype Business Server into an ongoing support model, a subscription model. There will be additional updates and patches, but don't expect any huge updates or changes.

It still feels like it's very much in maintenance mode. But for customers who want or need a server based product, Skype Business Server lives on along with Exchange Server and SharePoint server. Microsoft have started talking about M365 Local as an idea that you can run your own instance of Microsoft 365 and Skype Business Server would be part of that conversation because there is no server version of Microsoft Teams.

A nice feature coming to Microsoft Teams phone with Copilot, is the ability to automatically generate transfer notes. when you're transferring a call, you will get a summary of what's been said so far that we passed on to the person you're transferring to. This is on desktop clients and on the physical IP desk phones as well.

This does require teams' phone, and the M365 Copilot license. Nice to see these AI features coming into Team's phone now.

Teams client health dashboard, so this is in the Teams Admin Center.

And this will give you version numbers for your team clients to make sure they're updating properly. Also give you any issues that are happening with those clients. like crashes or launch failures. This is some great visibility to understand is your client estate healthy? Are there any commonalities between issues you're seeing?

So for example, late last year we saw an issue with a particular set of video drivers and teams. This kind of visibility where you'll be able to say, oh, okay. All the clients that are having issues are on this version number. All of them are aligned to these users or these machines. Lots of great detail in there.

there's a Microsoft blog if you wanna find out more information. And

another product. Retirement has been announced Microsoft Mesh, so way back in 2021 at Ignite. Mesh and metaverse and that whole movement was really strong and everybody was gonna meet in the metaverse and and mesh. That hasn't really come to fruition. Microsoft are now scaling that back. So the mesh PC and Quest apps are going, the mesh site is going, if you want this 3D meeting experience, you can still schedule an immersive event in teams.

I never think this got mainstream traction and I suspect there wasn't enough usage to justify the continued investment here. 

and that is going in December. So Microsoft given six months notice. If you want more information, it's on the link in the slide. Another one for it pros that I'm really excited about is silent call testing. . This is actually using the clients out there, As you have users deployed, you can set their teams client up to silently, do test calls for 60 seconds. It will loop them. It will target a specific subnet. This is the window client and the Mac client, and essentially it'll run when the users are idle and stop if the users actually need the teams' client.

So there's no UI change for the user. Just a silent test. This does require the team's premium license, and this is coming in August. I haven't had hands on yet, but looking forward to getting into the detail of that. Onto rooms and devices. big important announcement. people have still not set themselves up to be ready for these AOSP firmware changes on teams rooms.

There's been so much talk about this. do double check that you've set your configuration up right to be ready for this. Two big vendors updates are starting on July 21st. Neat and Polly. There's a lot of those systems out there. So if you are running teams rooms, check this link out.

Double check that you've configured, right? Make sure you test with AOSP check. It's updating properly. 

another one for it. Pros or rooms? Pros. this is AI in the teams Rooms Pro portal. So this is the first time we're seeing AI baked into the teams rooms, pro portal Admin experience. Right now it is a kind of read-only experience, so you can extract inventory and health data by asking with natural language queries, and this AI can also reach the documentation to tell you how to do things.

This is the beginning of a journey for Microsoft. There's anticipation this AI will be able to do much more, potentially actually take actions for you as well. So this is the first step on that journey. Look out. I've got a video coming soon with Microsoft on how this works and what some of the vision is for where this is going.

No M365 Copilot license needed for this one, so it'll be available to everybody who has teams, rooms, pro license, and the Pro portal, which is really nice to see.

This is a good one for Teams phones. This is the ability to assign license keys to contacts or speed dials or shared lines from the Teams Admin Center, so remotely configure them. Assign line keys. You can do a generic configuration across multiple devices, or you can do device models specific templates as well.

This is really great for things like common area phone scenarios where you want to set some line keys to do particular things or have particular speed dials, and that's coming July.

Teams rooms on windows boards are going to get edge in private browsing mode. We've seen some preview videos of this. This is the ability to launch Microsoft Edge in a temporary browser mode and access web apps from within edge. 

This is essentially a Microsoft Edge icon on the touch board to run it, and it will open up in a temporary session, you can do everything you could do on a web browser at that point. So you can log into Microsoft apps, you can log into third party apps. And there's gonna be, of course, some manageability around this in terms of what's allowed, what's not allowed, turning it on, turning it off. But exciting to see that coming.

That's just hit the roadmap and it is due in September. Another quick one is team's phone firmware updates. If you haven't seen this already, make sure you are updating your team's phone firmware . There was a new update released on 30th of June. It fixes some critical issues, no feature updates, but some important issues. So if you've got teams, desk phones, do make sure you're updating them.

I mentioned we've been updating the Empowering.Cloud site. Many thanks to all of our patrons, benefactors, and supporters who make it possible to do this stuff. Part of that is our community research. these are free to access reports for the community, and we're refreshing all the content at the moment.

So I've just updated the teams rooms, panels, comparison, and I'm really interested to hear feedback on what we've chosen as the properties to compare the devices. We plan to add a USP section to help you understand different benefits of different devices as well.

And I am working on the Microsoft Teams Rooms, boards comparison and teams Rooms on Windows is coming. Also recording and contact center. if you're interested in this detail, do jump in, have a look and ping me any feedback or ideas you've got for the research reports

onto the M365 Copilot news. researcher and analyst agent are generally available These are a step change in how useful the AI is. These are the reasoning models. Models that can take multiple steps, go back and forth over queries and data, and give you a more coherent output report 

now we have these as part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot. So researcher, as the name suggests, is kind of go out and pull a bunch of information together and gimme a report. An analyst is more focused on numbers, so give it some numerical data and look for insights in that numerical data. These are all generally available now.

They are limited to 25 queries a month over both agents. These are computationally quite expensive. It's really interesting to see how Microsoft are limiting that,

and it's much the same as OpenAI do with chat GPT or Google do with Gemini, they have limits. The interesting difference is Microsoft don't have a way to step up on those limits. So those other things have a $200 license option where you can step up for more queries. but at the moment it's interesting to see, well, Microsoft go pay as you go.

How will they let you burst on those queries? that's still to be defined. But if you've got the M365 Copilot license, go and check out researcher.

I'm also really excited for this development. This is voice chat in both M365 Copilot chat, the included version and M365 Copilot the paid version. So this is being able to talk in real time to your Copilot assistant. 

if you've looked at other AI tools, Chat GPT or Perplexity for example, they both have voice modes . Same type of technology, but now with our corporate data as well, so being able to talk to it and ask, what's coming up in my day, what's important in my email? Really excited for this capability, and this is coming in August 

And as is the continued Copilot push, Microsoft are now putting Copilot chat. So this is the included version, not the M365 Copilot. So the ability to just do web reasoning, not to reason over your corporate data. They're embedding that experience into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and we knew it was already coming to Outlook and already coming to teams.

It's a really great way to onboard users to using AI safely in the workplace. And maybe some of those users find uses that step up to the value of having the M365 Copilot license, but also for business change and user adoption.

It's a big impact ' cause users are going to see this experience in the apps, but in this mode, in Copilot chat. It can't reason over the corporate data. So it'd be interesting to see how this works in things like Word and Excel, because essentially it will be a panel where you can query web Copilot, but it has no context of the data in the app.

This is gonna roll out on by default. If you want to change it, you can check out the Message Center link for more information on that.

And finally an important policy change. Microsoft are changing the way M365 users can grant access to data to third party apps. this was traditionally on by default, meaning that in a default tenant configuration, a user could sign up for something like Calendarly, and let it access their personal calendar.

Microsoft is changing this to off by default. Admins can still change it for users if they want, and I think mainly it's a reaction to all these third party AI agents that people have been signing up for, that are joining meetings, reading calendar, emailing notes. After the meetings. A whole bunch of users have signed up for them without necessarily blessing those experiences.

Tony Redmond did a really good write up if you wanna get into the detail of it there. And also check out the message center for more details.

Lastly onto the events tends to not be many in-person events. This time of year, it's a little bit quiet of in person. We still have a lot going on online, so we've got the Microsoft Teams devices ask us anything.

We're trying a new format called Let's Talk Teams, and it's more of a kind of interactive conversational format. On the first one we're getting into Microsoft Teams recording. We've got the Microsoft Recording product owner. Michael from Numonix 

and some customer stories in the mix. , And also a little bit of what's coming on the roadmap So look out for that. we've got the Microsoft partner kickoff 22nd of July

and then topic at the moment, extend versus unify teams. Contact centers, Matt Landis, who is very deep into this, talks through all the differences between unify and extend the new ACS model. Teams phone extensibility. How it works technically and also some of the gaps between extend and unify. I'm personally looking forward to mastering Microsoft 365 Change with Michael and Ally. We have an enterprise service called ChangePilot where we take all the Microsoft 365 changes, we summarize them and we have a workflow to help enterprises manage them. And in that webinar, we're gonna go deep on everything we've learned around Microsoft 365 change best practices.

. Ally is a real expert in managing change in her legal organization, and Michael is a fellow MVP who actually wrote some of the recommendations around how to manage change as well.

We have our regular Copilot fireside chat, and this time we're going deep onto Copilot studio and agents. Looking forward to that.

So that's all the news for July. I really hope that's been useful for you. If you've got any questions or comments, do leave them below. Appreciate anybody liking and sharing this as well. It really helps . Thanks again to Pure IP, enterprise Voice, BCM one for all their support, And thanks again to you for making it to the end of the briefing.