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 October, 2025. Many thanks to Neat this month's benefactor. Really appreciate all their support. Neat. Have a great range of devices for teams and some exciting MDEP news, which we'll be getting into. We're ramping up towards Microsoft Ignite in November.

there is a lot going on, particularly in AI and Copilot new models, new capabilities, new agents in teams, new agents in office. Lots going on, so let's try and decode it all for you.

First up, if you haven't been on Empowering.Cloud recently, we've got some great new content. As always, really interesting session on what's new in ai, in Teams devices with Irena. She gives us a bit of an idea about what's coming this fy, what's going on with devices, AI in the device, Pro Portal, et cetera.

I also talk to Gidi at AudioCodes around Voca. They are one of the five new unified certified contact centers, and we got into Unify and what it means and what some of the new capabilities are, 

On the podcast, we also got into AI and automation around voice and SBCs with Matt Hurst and a really interesting conversation with Simon about how you differentiate between the different teams devices, both from a end customer choosing perspective and also from an OEM perspective.

Also, I'm just off the back of Unified Communications Expo in London. Really great sessions. Thanks so much. If you came to the sessions or said hello, I had a marathon number of sessions, with Microsoft. Really great sessions around teams and teams phone. Hope you enjoyed those. Hope they were useful.

First up, we're gonna go through the Microsoft 365 Copilot news. I feel like we have to go through the Copilot news first 'cause it intertangled with the teams news so much. The first thing is that Copilot free Copilot chat, which is the version included in all the Microsoft 365 licenses, is now going to be integrated into the office apps, and it will be able to engage with the current open document.

this is a big step up in free functionality in Copilot. Previously, the free Copilot chat was Web Grounded only. It couldn't engage with your document, even if you opened it in an app. Now with the new Copilot chat experience, it's the same Copilot chat engine as the standalone Copilot chat app integrated into the office apps, and it's gaining the ability to engage with the current Open Word document or current open PowerPoint.

It can't reach out to the rest of your documents. It can't do as much as the full M365 Copilot license. It can't reach into your SharePoint, your OneDrive. It's just the open current document, but a nice step forward in terms of functionality and for licensed users. That experience of the Unified Copilot Chat means that you are having the same experience, whether you are in Word Outlook PowerPoint or the Copilot Chat app, 

They're not separate Copilot instances. They're now all being pulled together, which is really nice.

Good news is we're gonna get the same thing in Microsoft Teams. So we're gonna get a unified Copilot chat experience on the right hand pane and it will interact with whatever's going on, whether it's chat channels, calling or meeting content. And this is really great 'cause again, this is going down a road where.

All the teams data is available to the main Copilot experience. The difference in teams from the other office apps is this will only be available in teams if you've got that Microsoft 365 Copilot license. So whereas word in the free Copilot, you can open up and engage with the current Word document.

In teams, they've decided it's hard to distinguish current information. if you're a free user, you'll get the top left Copilot shortcut, which is just the web-based Copilot chat, but it doesn't have any context of the open chat or channel or meeting. This is rolling out over the coming months, different functionality coming at different times. , You can check the details in that message center link 

More ai, we're getting an agent mode in Word and Excel. agent Mode is Microsoft's term for being more proactive. So it will start writing the documents for you, engaging with the documents Microsoft, to try and to coin a term vibe working a bit off the back of Vibe Coding, which I'm not sure any employers want people vibe working, but we'll see.

This is Early Days it's in the Frontier program, so you have to opt in. It's only in the web clients at the moment, and it's only in ENUS English at the moment as well. This is built on the latest open AI models in terms of agent capabilities,

new agents in teams as well. We're getting channel agents in teams. These are currently in public preview. You can check them out now. Idea is you have an agent per channel. It is grounded over that data in the channel, and it can do things like help you build meeting agendas, pull out tasks, do summaries, and even do some proactive things like a status report.

It will proactively ping you an individual status report of what's gone on in that channel. Really interesting new capability. Grounded at the channel level, so it's per channel so you can engage with the content in that channel only.

This is a great new feature. And Microsoft are actively looking for feedback.

We've got a briefing coming up with Sandyha at Microsoft who looks after this feature, so look out for more details on Empowering.Cloud soon.

This one was a huge announcement. Anthropics Claude Models coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot studio, you can opt in and have the Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus four one models available in Copilot studio.

This is particularly interesting because these models are not running on Azure. They're running by Anthropic and they're running on AWS. They have an agreement with Amazon, but Microsoft have still brought these models in, optionally for office users. it's great to see Microsoft providing whatever models are the best and whatever users want, and these models have been very well respected in terms of creative content, in terms of coding, they really are quite impressive.

So despite the Microsoft investment and open ai, they're still prepared to give other options, Microsoft are saying that this is running in a, different cloud outside of Microsoft 365. So Microsoft's default data protection and data processing rules don't apply.

So it's a really big decision for organizations. Do they trust Anthropic and the joint agreement and the way Anthropic deal with the data. But certainly very exciting to have these options. I expect more use of these models coming in the future.

And talking of using the anthropic models, this is the first kind of feature we've seen that leverages the Anthropic model. this is called Office Agent, and it's available in Copilot chat. where you start from chat. It will generate a PowerPoint or a Word document and soon Excel document and this is interesting because Anthropic have clawed their native product and they've been talking about how they can make Excel documents and Word documents natively, so I've got to assume this is using the same type of engine and creating those documents. great to see Microsoft bringing this option into the Microsoft 365 stack.

I have enabled the anthropic models on our tenant. I haven't had a chance to check this out yet, but I'll be testing it out and also comparing it to Anthropic clause's native experience.

Last thing on the AI news, this is a bit of an interesting one. So Microsoft have launched Microsoft 365 premium, bless the Microsoft naming. This is the consumer product. So this is for home and family users and Microsoft 365 premium is essentially the, personal and family subscription with Copilot bundled in, and its total price is $20 a month.

Microsoft's trying to add a lot of value into that family edition. It does only give Copilot to the bill payer the primary user. But what's interesting for us is Microsoft are highlighting that you can bring your consumer Copilot to work. this is crossing all sorts of interesting boundaries, but essentially they're promoting that in Microsoft Word or Excel.

You can sign into multiple current accounts, so you can be signed into your work intra Idea account. You can also sign into your consumer Outlook dot com account, which is tied to your consumer office, and they will let you bring the Copilot functionality you bought in consumer and use it on the document that's open from work.

It only works in the office apps 'cause they have that dual sign in functionality and essentially it's bringing the license across just for that current document. Admins can turn this off. I think a lot of people will turn this off.

But also it's funny timing 'cause we just talked at the top of the update about how Copilot chat is getting the ability in the free edition to engage with the document So I don't really see what this is bringing when every enter ID user that has Copilot chat can engage in Copilot in their current document with Copilot chat.

Don't really need to bring their consumer Copilot. But anyway, worth checking this out. There's some details there of how it works it's called multiple account sign in access, but if you are an Admin and you don't want to blur the line between the consumer account and the business.

Make sure you turn off that ability to sign into your work office with your consumer accounts

Onto the Microsoft Teams news. A few interesting updates. We're going to get explicit consent for recording and transcription in teams, one-to-one calls, we've already got this in meetings, but Microsoft will add the option to one-to-one calls, if, consent is required.

The remote participant will get a popup or a prompt on the phone saying, do you agree to comply and be recorded? they won't be able to engage in that conversation until they agree So pretty aggressive proactive consent is required in some countries, in some regions, optional.

I don't see many people turning this on. It's pretty aggressive, but if you do require it, it is in there now and that it's rolling out November.

Interesting security feature. Preventing screen capture. I've definitely had this asked before. This is for teams, desktop clients and team web clients. If users are joining from a client that doesn't support this functionality, they'll be put in an audio only mode. So this is really high security stuff.

This will require the team's premium license. if you toggle this on in the settings, they won't have the ability to screenshot during the duration of that session. This rolling out September.

Last new feature. I'm so glad this is back. We lost , save items during the transition from, teams 1.0 to 2.1. saved items are back. They're much clearer in the desktop client now they're in the top left. Also they're changing in mobile. mobile is moving from the legacy saved app to a save experience on the top toolbar 

Really nice to see this kind of unifies the save message experience across desktop and mobile. Just a little note that if your users have saved items in the old format on mobile, those won't be carried across. So worth checking that out and maybe doing some user comms that'll be cutting over at the end of this month as well.

Quick look at operator Connects. We have got a new country, Paraguay has been added by tartar. We are up to 115 providers now, and we've also got a new teams phone. Mobile provider at and t Business are now covering the us so that's two providers in the US it's some competition there, which is interesting.

I think at and t are also bundling. In with their business plan, so not charging an extra amount for those plans. So at and t will be the first to bring that in at no additional cost.

also some changes to Microsoft Teams pricing and packaging. This is an outcome of the EU Competition Commission complaint. It's gone back and forward. We've talked about it a lot on the updates. So Microsoft previously completely broke out teams from Office 365 for enterprise customers or Microsoft 365.

For enterprise customers, you had to buy the Microsoft 365 plan and the teams enterprise add-on and bring it back. Now, per the agreement, Microsoft will be bringing back the bundled suite options for Enterprises. So you'll go back to having the option of buying your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 Suite with teams included.

they have changed the pricing around a bit. the packages that exclude. Teams will go down in cost. the enterprise license for teams standalone that you optionally add on will go up a bit in cost.

I won't go through all the pricing, but those are the Deltas. So essentially $8 delta between buying Microsoft 365 without teams and with teams and a little bit less on the business plans proportionally. , There's a link to the competition commission announcement and agreements and commitments from Microsoft as well.

Onto rooms and devices. We've got some new headsets out. The native Bluetooth headsets. Loggy have got their new zone wireless two Es for business. 

I was recently at their London Lodge work event. Really great event and they're getting a really nice portfolio of headsets and some really aggressive price points for the different options as well. Looking forward to getting my hands on the two ES soon. Also, Polly are the second vendor to hit the certified native Bluetooth list as well, so congrats to them.

I mentioned this at the top of the show. Both Neat and Cisco have announced they are going to join the MDEP partnership.MDEP is the Microsoft devices ecosystem platform. This is Microsoft's version of the Android Open source project. Microsoft bake it up, secure it, do what they want to do with the open source project, then provided the OEMs.

So the idea here is for customers, they get a Microsoft Blessed os. The OBM still can still add their capabilities, their extra secret source, their camera control, their remote control agents, everything they want to add as well.

And I think we'll be hearing some more at Microsoft Ignite. So stay tuned for that.

A quick look at the devices roadmap. There is a new, voice and face enrollment dashboard for admins coming in December in the Teams Admin Center. This is great. I've heard this asked multiple times. This will give you an idea of who's enrolled for face and voice enrollment, which is both for voice isolation on the team's client, but also allows the rooms to recognize people in the rooms.

In room camera control for teams rooms on windows, being able to switch the view multi cameras within the room. 

Health signals coming to teams, rooms on windows as well. this is banners in the teams room telling you there's a problem. This will mean if you walk into the room and the room knows there's an issue, you know the camera's not working, there's some kind of other issue.

It will banner and proactively tell the end users, which really nice to see.

Also a recommended action page coming to the teams pro portal, this is a good way to have a single page or say these are the recommended actions you take. And I think this ties into the AI in Pro portal story about proactive AI management and potentially pushing recommendations of things to do.

Last up, let's have a look at events. We are well into event season, online. We have our regular Microsoft Teams devices. Ask us anything if you wanna get deep into devices. We also have a new monthly Microsoft 365 change roundup.

Really great show on Copilot fireside chat. We've got Gary Tinder going into agents. Of course we have Ignite coming up as well. We'll be doing a teams fireside chat live from Ignite with Kerry, breaking down all the news and post Ignite. We'll also have the Microsoft uc user group London.

Really hope that's been a useful update for you. Many thanks to Neat for being such a big supporter of the community and everything we do. exciting news from them on the MDEP front. If you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, do leave them below. and if this has been useful for you, please do share it to a friend. Thanks very much.