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 August, 2025. Many thanks to Logitech, this month's benefactor. Be sure to check out their new native certified Bluetooth headsets. We'll talk more about those in a bit. first up, a lot's going on. We've just had the launch of chat, GPT-5, both from OpenAI and also in all the Microsoft products, so that's really exciting.

We've had Microsoft's end of year earnings for 2025. Some interesting numbers there. We've got some new teams features as well to talk through. So let's dive right in.

If you haven't been on Empowering.Cloud recently, we've got lots of new great content there. There's that briefing on native Bluetooth headsets I talked about with Gregory. We go into what they are, how they work with teams. Also the open office certification, really insightful conversation there. Also some interesting updates on the podcast.

We talked about the AI shift. We've talked about teams in large environments. Callum, really interesting podcast. He works with customers with hundreds of thousands of users about managing teams there. And also on the blog, we've got a interesting blog around Microsoft ending meter charging for APIs, which we'll talk about in the update as well.

So for the earnings, Microsoft ended their financial year 2025. We got the earnings at the end of July. Massive numbers. They really blew past all expectations and it's all cloud and AI driving big revenue numbers. revenue 76.44 billion. Microsoft Cloud, was up 23%. Azure was up 34%. largely driven by ai.

The M365 average revenue per user climbed again, which was attributed to E5 and Copilot. The all up M365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year, which was attributed mostly to SMB and frontline worker. we didn't get any exact numbers around Copilot. We got our Copilot family of apps has surpassed a hundred million monthly active users.

that's not an exact number and that seems to be mixing in. Commercial and consumer and GitHub and everything. they said that tens of thousands of organizations have already been using researcher, analyst, and those are available in the M365 Copilot. So that gives some idea that tens of thousands of organizations are at least using that license.

amazing numbers from Microsoft. Congrats on some massive numbers, and it's very clear that AI investment is driving some revenue. So onto the Microsoft Teams news. first up Mercedes are adding a teams app to their in-car system.

Interestingly, this will work with audio and video in the car. So when you're stationary, you can do two-way audio and video calls. But even when you're moving, your inbound video will be cut off. you won't be able to see the people on the screen, but your video recording will continue.

You can turn that on or off as you please. that means people can see you driving as you're discussing . Interesting debates on LinkedIn about the kind of safety implications of this. Mercedes seem to be all in with Microsoft because they've also integrated Intune into the in-car system and they've got Copilot coming soon as well.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Is this useful? Is this a safety issue? Should it only work when the car is parked? I think we'll see more of these integrations in the coming months.

A feature I'm really excited about is intelligent meeting recap in teams including screen shared content. So this is snapshots of content shared during the meeting. It will go into the intelligent recap, both in the sense of you'll be able to see some of the frames, but also the summary will take content shared on the screen and make that part of the recap.

And this is really useful for both the text summary and also some of the audio summaries we've been seeing coming through now where you want to know some of the content that was shared on screen as well. 

one that I think has been popular in the Slack world is triggering workflows based on emoji reactions. you can have an emoji reaction to a message either in a channel or a chat, and that can kick off a power automate workflow. This is limited to particular chats or particular channels, but you can do things like have it raise a Jira ticket if it's a bug, log into OneNote, into email, whatever it may be.

I haven't seen immediate use case for this, but it is interesting and clearly in the Slack world it's been a popular feature. So nice to see it coming over as teams,

We talked about screen sharing content going into the intelligent recap. Unfortunately, one that has been postponed is Copilot being able to analyze screen shared content during a meeting. So the theory here was that snapshots of the screen content would go into the reasoning and you'll be able to ask questions over the content.

It looks like that is now indefinitely postponed. Apparently it's still coming into intelligent recap, so I'm not sure why it got postponed for Copilot analysis, but hopefully we will hear more about that soon because I was really excited to have Copilot reason over that screen shared content as well.

A little update for the team's client, but I know that some people will be pleased with this.

The ability to minimize the size of the notification windows for teams. So we've been able to pick the position on the screen, and now we're able to say we would like a more compact notification on the screen as well.

Looking over to teams desk phones. The Copilot and AI journey is definitely coming into the phones as well.

So a couple of things here. Suggested prompts on the phone. if Copilot is running in the call, you can have some suggested prompts for that call. Also, a summary of the call on transfer. So literally being able to drive from the IP phone on the screen and send the summary to someone on the team side.

And also RTT support, real time tech support. This was a European regulation, requirement. We talked about it on last month's update. That's come through to IP phones as well. So you'll be able to see transcription in real time to hit that RTT regulation 

I recently recorded a podcast around teams desk phones and what's going on and the AI journey with desk phones that one's not been published yet, but look out for that on the Teams Insider Podcast feed soon.

This is quite an important change to how teams phone routing works. Specifically calling on behalf of, so calling outbound on behalf of a agent queue an also attendance attendant. Or potentially the scenario where you do callback with PSDN. Call from the call queue auto attendant. So two different message center items here.

One is if you're using operator connect. The other one is if you're using calling plan. Microsoft are changing the way that works, so you will need a pay as you go calling plan on all those resource accounts. If you want to make outbound calls on behalf of the auto attendant or call queue.

for operator connect, it'll come down to how your operator charges you. Some of them will charge you incrementally for those abilities. Some will charge with DDIs to be assigned those auto attendant call queues. Some will require you to have a user cost associated with those or a service number cost associated with those call queues and auto attendants.

So check out those two mc items, particularly if you're using operator connect. talk to your operator and make sure however you've got your auto attendants and call queues configured. You will continue to be able to make outbound calls. And for those not familiar with this scenario, this is things like.

Someone ringing into the business and then you wanting to make an outbound call to a mobile device. So maybe the security team, run around with mobiles, or it's a shared office, someone calls in. You want to then push that call out to the mobile That is an outbound call on behalf of the call queue or the auto attendant.

In contact center, we have our very first certified unified contact center. Unify is the new name for what was power, and this is the model where the contact center is using Azure Communication Services to route the calls and integrate with teams. Interestingly, CentrePal, were not on the original list of Microsoft Partners announced us working on Unify.

so they've really jumped in to be the very first certified. We know that others on that list are going through the certification process at the moment. So we expect to see more.

Hey, this is Tom from the Future, just doing the edit since I recorded AudioCodes Voca also certified for Unify, so that's now two certified for Unify Audiocodes Voca and CentrePal. Congrats to both of them for certifying. And it's really interesting to compare, extend, and unify. 

It's really not the case. Simply that unify is better than extend actually. They have different capabilities. Microsoft are clearly investing in the Unify model. I did a webinar with Matt Landis of Landis Technologies, and we talked about Extend and Unify, they're mixing both into one product, so customers have the options, and we talked about the pros and cons of each model and how Landis are bringing them together.

Some nice Microsoft places. Updates coming in August. Places will get a web-based management portal, so no need to be hashing around with PowerShell scripts anymore. From a manageability point of view, that will be a big step forward.

Also some new desk status mode, so unavailable, assigned, reserved and drop in. Also coming in August and a little further out in September. Map-based desk booking, so being able to on the desktop client or the mobile client book desks based on a visual map interface as well. Nice to see. Continued investment in Microsoft places, and I'm expecting to see more from places this year.

if you are using places, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback and if you're excited about these new features as well.

Lastly on teams, I mentioned it at the top of the show, Microsoft are dropping incremental charges or consumption charges for what they previously called metered graph APIs. So these were APIs that were supposed to add value to exporting your data. So taking data out of teams, chat and channels. For example, meeting transcriptions, recording.

There were APIs that had an incremental cost to do that. That cost has now been dropped, the APIs still available, and that is starting towards the end of August. This is really great for any ISVs who want to pull data out. things like migrations between tenants, but also various AI scenarios where you want to get those meeting transcripts or channel content as well.

Onto the Microsoft 365 Copilot news. The big news obviously is Chat GPT-5 is here, at time of recording. OpenAI launched Chat GPT-5 yesterday. and the really big news is it hit all the Microsoft properties day one.

In fact, I had GPT-5 in my M365 Copilot chat before I had it in my paid open AI plus plan as well. So Microsoft have it launched across Foundary, across studio, across GitHub and M365 Copilot, and it's coming to the free Copilot chat and consumer as well. Early days in terms of hands-on for me. But it does look like this model is a jump forward.

It includes options to kind of fast respond or to do depth reasoning without choosing a particular submodel yourself, Traditionally, Microsoft have been a bit slow at getting the model. It would go out to a chat GPT first, and then we'd see it a couple of months later.

Now Microsoft are fully committed to getting these models out as soon as they're available, and that's great for users. looking forward to getting stuck into using M365 Copilot with GPT-5.

Another interesting Copilot development. is Copilot chat, this is the free slash included version of Copilot and it will soon have the ability to summarize email thread in Outlook. Now this is interesting because the line has always traditionally been Copilot chat isn't. embedded in the apps and doesn't have access to the corporate data.

That line got a bit blurry when suddenly Copilot chat was embedded into the app. initially, teams then Outlook, then the rest of the app. So Copilot chat can't get access to the application data, but it is a side pain available in teams. And this is blurring the line further now, Copilot chat.

In Outlook, both the classic Outlook and the new Outlook. We'll be able to summarize emails even without the M365 Copilot license. So Microsoft continuing to blur the line of where Copilot Chat works and where you need the full M365 Copilot license.

Great for those Copilot chat users. Another level of functionality included in the box. I wonder how from a corporate comms perspective, we're gonna be able to explain to users that some scenarios you can reach data in the apps and some scenarios you can't. And that's rolling out between August and October.

So quite a big window for that one.

Another positive development for M365 Copilot. Soon in Word, it will be able to continuously re-edit the document, so right now it can generate an initial document and then when you use it in the chat pan, it can't update that document. How you'd hope it would work or expect it to work would be much like GitHub Copilot, where you're talking in the chat pan and it continually updates the code.

In this case, come September, the chat panel will be able to interact with the Word document and continue to update and change it. That's a significant improvement in the Copilot in Word experience.

Lastly, we're onto events, obviously relatively quiet July and August. In terms of events, we still have our online events. We've got the teams fireside chat. We're diving into Dynamics 365. We've got our regular Microsoft Teams devices ask us anything in terms of in person. End of September, we have the Microsoft uc user group.

London Neat to hosting us for that. Looking forward to that one. Then shortly after that we've got UC Expo, London. That's a really big show. Lots of uc focus. Really excited for that. I'll be doing a few sessions on the first day, bit further into October in the UK, South Coast Summit. That's on a Saturday and then I'm really excited for Microsoft Ignite.

Bit further out in November. I'm already hearing there's going to be lots there. Really excited for that and I'll of course be over there.

Thanks so much for listening to the Briefing. Many thanks to Logitech for all their support. Really appreciate them. Hope that's been a useful update for you. If you've got any comments, questions, or feedback, please do leave them below. Thanks a lot.