Ignite Live Blog : MTG30 – MSTeams Rooms deployment for an inclusive and enhanced meeting room

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

MTG30 - Microsoft Teams Rooms deployment for an inclusive and enhanced meeting room

Speakers : Christian Schacht, James Corso, Greg Baribault

In this sessions, we learn about the different options for meeting spaces, what to consider during planning, deployment, best practices, and new tools for managing your Teams meeting rooms at scale.

Microsoft Teams has many devices that fit all your personal needs and scenario’s ranging from Individual to Group Workspaces.

Why Teams Rooms (Footlocker Customer story)

Self Service one touch experience is easy to navigate.
They want to strip out HDMI and cords as you can just cast your screen or join the meeting to share the screen
It is flexible from Hardware perspective as you can select your own speakers, microphones, video devices and the actual meeting room devices. You can mix and match as required on a per meeting room basis.
Surface HUB is more a compliment to MTR than a replacement, using it as a companion device into the meeting to have great whiteboarding capabilities.

Announcing at Ignite: Collaboration Bar for Microsoft Teams: Intended for smaller huddle meeting rooms for Teams Meetings in any room, simple to install on any display, includes Audio, Video and Computer & managed from the Teams Admin Center.

Devices for Shared Spaces

Microsoft Teams Rooms

Ease of use: Start meetings in seconds (No hassle with cables or trying to find what meeting to join, just a simple one button touch to start a meeting)
Inclusive: Everyone gets a seat at the table (Remote participants can actively participate and contribute to the meetings)
Scalable: Configurations for any space (Working with Partners to enable any size of room)
Ready: Deploy and manage at scale (Ready for users and ready for IT to monitor and manage them, keep firmware and software up to date)

Currently there are 5 Vendors that have Teams Meeting Rooms solutions (Crestron, HP, Lenovo, Logitech, Yealink)

There are a very broad set of devices for Audio & Video that can be used in any combination with Microsoft Teams Room systems devices.

A sample of new devices include

Content Camera devices
Ceiling Tile Microphones that have the best audio experience
Pana Cast device from Jabra

Customer Obsession + Continuous Innovations

360 Camera Support
Proximity Based “Bring your own meeting”

A new concept of meeting rooms at Microsoft is the Ad-hoc only meeting rooms that cannot be scheduled with Outlook. The only way to use those rooms is to use them and use proximity-based join to bring them into your meetings.

Microsoft Whiteboard Meeting & Content Capture Device

If the conference room has touch display, then the Microsoft Whiteboard will be interactive. The magic whiteboard can bring in existing physical whiteboards into the meeting.

Theming and Branding

Full Screen theme images for Front of Room display. Coming Soon: Branding on the Console

Announcements and Coming Soon @Ignite

Proximity join will automatically answer the incoming call on the meeting room device (currently you must accept the call manually)
Ability to share and save the magic whiteboard Capture & Save snapshots and then can be converted to Microsoft Whiteboard digital ink.
Branding on the Meeting Room Screens and console
Control Extension for MTR partners to enable full control of the entire meeting room like lights, blinds, etc…
The ability to join 3^rd Party Meetings like Cisco and Zoom, this will be launching early next year. Microsoft Teams Rooms devices will have the capability to join web-based Cisco & Zoom meetings and the Zoom & Cisco devices will be able to join Microsoft Teams meetings.
Meeting Room Devices management in the Teams Admin Center
Surface HUB and Teams Rooms can be used both in the same meeting, Microsoft will release coordinated meeting room join. Both devices will join to a meeting when clicking join on one of the devices. MTR and HUB are paired and at the same time there is great front of room experience including the best Digital Whiteboard experience

Microsoft did an actual demonstration of joining a Cisco and Zoom meetings from a Microsoft Teams Meeting Room device and it is based on Web Based joins that use Web RTC mainly to join the Cisco/Zoom meetings.

MTR joining a Zoom meeting

MTR joining a Cisco meeting

Device Management for Teams Meeting Rooms.

In the Devices section of the Teams Admin Portal you will see the Teams Rooms Tab that will list all Rooms with Manufacture, Model, Last Seen & Health of the meeting rooms.
Call Quality and Usage is available
Settings can be changed, and devices can be restarted.

Microsoft Teams is partnering with the Intune teams to manage the Windows components of the device. There will be cross links in between Intune and the Teams Room configuration in the Teams Admin Portal.

When clicking on an actual Room system device the portal will show the Peripherals connected on a specific device, it will include people counting from the MTR itself, in addition to health also the actual usage can be tracked. Changes to configuration are tracked.
All of this will take away the pain of managing the Teams Meeting Rooms.