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, September, 2025. Many thanks to Ribbon for all their support. Their benefactor this month really appreciate their support to the Community. Ribbon are really well known for voice infrastructure in carriers, in enterprise, for Microsoft Teams, and all the other UCaaS vendors, but also containerization, automation and AI in that infrastructure.

I'll be talking this week at their Lisbon Insights event. Looking forward to that, and if you want to catch one, there is an insights event happening in Dallas, in November the 11th or the 13th. Really great events that bring the industry together and drive some really interesting insights. As the name suggests, we are now fully back in, all the holiday season is over and there's a lot going on in Microsoft Teams and Copilot, so let's get stuck right in.

First up on Empowering.Cloud. We haven't been over there recently. We've got some great new expert briefings. We're talking line of business agent use cases with a and Chris. team's, phone number backups with Damien, which is really interesting conversation. He hit an issue and has shared a script there also, Crestron talking about their latest multi-camera solutions and new capabilities.

And SOC two, what SOC two type two is and why it's important in choosing your vendor or your solution provider for Microsoft Teams. That was a really interesting conversation with Steve at Numonix On the blog front, I also do a talk through of the Neat portfolio devices and some of the USPS in their devices as well.

On the podcast, it's been a really good run of interesting guests. The Teams Phone Roadmap podcast is one of our all time high listens. Lots of interest in how AI are going into teams, physical desk phones, some customer conversations about rolling out Microsoft Teams and Copilot.

I really enjoyed the conversation with Jim Gayner all around the kind of team's journey from his perspective at directions on Microsoft from the early days of kind of the Slack compete to where we are now with AI and Copilot.

onto the teams news. First up, we are getting a new improved malicious URL protection for all Microsoft Teams users. So previously we've had Safe links, which is part of the Defender license.

So if you had Defender and you click a link, it would go through safe links. With Microsoft and it would block links if you thought they were unsafe. This is a new level that's open to everybody, even without a defender license, and it will pop up in teams before you click and say, this link is believed to be unsafe using the same defender, kind of indexing technology, but nice that you get a message before you even click the link, and again, available to all users.

Microsoft are also doing a lot of work around the profile card. This is a new organizational chart and you can see it there expanded and collapsed. There's more work being done on the profile card, so look out for more investment in that area.

This new org chart view is rolling out between November and December.

This is something that I really could have done with a few years ago. This is the ability to let certain users or certain groups of users in organization have external access to other organizations for Teams Chat Federation. This was all, nothing up until today even organization Allowed Federation or didn't allow Federation.

And now we'll be able to enable certain groups. So thinking finance, certain parts of the organization, work with a partner organization, but other parts of that organization can't talk to that you can now enable just sales to talk to that customer or just operations to talk to other organization.

Initially this will be rolling out, as just PowerShell capability in preview, but when it GA's, there will be a UI to configure it as well. And that's rolling out December.

I've talked about this before. This is remote log collection in teams, a really great addition for administrators and operations. Microsoft did a whole blog on how it worked, how it's kept secure, and then how to use it. If you haven't looked at this yet and you manage a larger infrastructure of Microsoft Teams, this is a really great addition to help you support users with issues where you have to collect logs for Microsoft and check out the blog below.

As has been the theme for this year, teams Contact Center and Contact Center has been a really hot and exciting and competitive space. And now we have teams phone sensibility generally available, and also five contact centers have certified for that new unified certification,

which means they run on Azure Communication services and are tightly integrated to Microsoft Teams. We've had some great content recently, with both Landis and AudioCodes about how unify works, the pros and cons of it, how it compares to extend, and also how the commercials models work. Really exciting to see, the first five certify and there's more investment being made here with the a ACS team.

Also, dynamics 365 contact center using this infrastructure as well. So look out for more news here in the future.

Not much on operator connect, a couple of new operators, so we're up to 115 operators, 106 countries covered, but it's been relatively slow over the last couple of months. I'll be keeping a close eye on that over the next few months. See if we get any more country coverage.

Microsoft Teams, Rooms and devices. News, First up, some of those new teams desk phone features are starting to roll out, so this is an improved UI for blind transfer and consultative transfer, really cleaning up the buttons experience across, phones with physical buttons, touch phones, and sidecars as well.

Again, if you're into teams, phone devices, do check out that podcast all around Team's phone and how AI is being integrated into the physical phone experience and the roadmap. Really great conversation. Lots of teams rooms on Windows News. First up for teams rooms on Windows boards, we will have touch console support.

This is rolling out October, so as, any other teams rooms on Windows, you'll be able to have a touch console and center of the room to control the experience, even though it's a touch board.

Some customers obviously using the board in a room type scenario, so want that controller option, so nice to see that coming. Also support for facilitator in scheduled and ad hoc meetings. We've talked about AI increasingly being embedded into the teams rooms experience. And this is facilitator that has been in preview coming to GA in November, and it's both for hybrid meetings and all in room meetings as well.

So using the teams room as kind of an AI hub, even for an all in person meeting. And browser support for Windows boards as well. Again, we talked about this when it was on the roadmap. This is now coming to fruition in October, and this is edge browser running in a kind of kiosk mode on the device.

Allowing you to run line of business applications, hit internet sites, other browser based apps during the team's experience, and also just using it as more of a collaboration service when it's not in a team meeting as well.

There's various management capabilities wrapped around this as well. You can check that out all in the message into message, and that's rolling out October. Lastly, on devices, I noticed the MDEP team are now pushing out more regular MDEP updates. So we've got these new, 13.1 and 15.2 updates, with bug fixes. Interesting to see the MDEP team continuing to push in terms of features and releases. There's more coming on that front, can't share at all quite yet. but look out for our briefings soon with more details about what the MDEP team are doing around teams, room devices, and other devices as well onto Microsoft 365 Copilot.

First up, interestingly, Microsoft and OpenAI have reached a tentative agreement. There was a public joint announcement and literally all the announcements said is we've reached an agreement. And this is talking around how Microsoft and Open AI's relationship continues, beyond the pre-agreed points in terms of what Microsoft have put in so far for funding and how Microsoft have access to the models.

Looking forward to hearing more details on this. this will define the future, how Microsoft have access to the models to bring into Microsoft 365, and another applications.

And also OpenAI becoming a for-profit company and a competitor as well as a partner. OpenAI recently gave some really interesting numbers in one of their funding rounds, They gave a lot of detail about their customer base.

So the customer base is split roughly 70% consumer and business, 30% enterprise. So interesting to see OpenAI having some really decent penetration in the enterprise. 

There are roughly 700 million weekly active users. about 4 million developers are built on the platform and there's roughly 5 million seats in the business products category as well. And overall, they're generating about 13 billion in revenue, which is up four x from 2024.

So open AI, continuing, see really amazing growth and getting really amazing recognition, both from consumers and increasingly from enterprise. And this is super interesting for us to look at because they're obviously a partner and a customer of Microsoft using the Azure infrastructure and with Microsoft investment, but also potentially a competitor in the enterprise space as well.

Going back to M365 copilots, we got a really good announcement. Sales service and finance Copilot. So these are the kind of dynamics like copilots. Previously, these were all $20 add-ons on top of the M365 Copilot. These are now going to be wrapped into the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, so you will have access to your M365 Copilot license, your $30 per user per month.

That will give you the sales Copilot, which is kind of your CRM integration into Dynamics or Salesforce, your services Copilot, which is kind of customer services, and the finance Copilot, which is pointed at people who are. Working in finance, ERP systems. not everybody's gonna need access to all of these Copilots, but nice to see these capabilities rolled into the M365 Copilot license for those who need them.

Really nice see Microsoft starting to simplify the number of licenses and number of options that have we have for Copilot and enterprise.

Lastly, on Copilot, Microsoft are improving the Copilot chat experience embedded in office apps. Essentially today, the Copilot and Excel, the Copilot in word, the Copilot in Outlook. They're all different instances of Copilot, and they're not unified. And what's happening is they're being brought into a unified single experience.

So the chat history will be shared between them, and the actual regular Copilot chat app. They'll be accessible for both. The Microsoft 365 Copilot chat users are either non Microsoft 365 Copilot users, and also for the Microsoft 365 Copilot users only with more capabilities in the applications.

During this transition, there will be a couple of things to consider so users will lose their chat history for those line of business application Copilot scenarios.

I can't imagine that's gonna affect many people heavily, but that is something to understand And this will be rolling out across all the applications in the M365 Suite between now and November. Onto events. We are definitely ramping back into event season.

in Empowering.Cloud we have our usual online events, so we have the Copilot fireside chat coming up with Karuana. We're looking forward to that. We have our in-person Microsoft uc, user group, London. Chris is gonna be talking about places and the new management web interface was really exciting.

Mark's gonna be talking about some of his team's journey at BP as well. Great conversation there. We have a new online monthly event happening. The Microsoft 365 change community call with, Darren and Darl.

We're gonna pull together some of the key changes in Microsoft 365 for that month. Present them and discuss them. Again, in person in London, we have uc Expo. That's gonna be really fun. I'm doing a lot of sessions on day one. A lot of key people from Microsoft are over as well. So looking forward to that.

There'll be some great presentations from Ilya and Scott and Kerry. gonna be really good sessions there. And then looking a bit further out to our next teams fireside chat. We also have Scott Plette talking Teams phone. So looking forward to that.

Microsoft are also doing a bit of an AI at work tour. They're doing, London, Munich, and Paris. if you can get to one of those, it's gonna be a really great session. lots of in, in-person conversation and if you're around, I might well see you at London one as well.

That's it for this month. Hope the update was useful for you. Again, many thanks to Ribbon for all their support. Look out for their insight event in Dallas in November 11th to 13th. Highly recommended. If this update was useful for you, please do like and share and then tell a friend. And if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, please do leave them below.

Thanks a lot.