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.
Happy New Year. I hope you had a good holiday break and welcome to the first update of 2025. Many thanks to Logitech for their support of Empowering.Cloud. Really appreciate their support. Look out for them at ISE and I also have some Logitech device news in this update as well. So it is January so normally it's a little bit quieter in terms of news over the holiday period but we did get some Decent announcements, particularly web chat causing a lot of interest.
So let's dive right in.
First up, we have some new content on Empowering.Cloud. I did a briefing with Mark Vale, who's a fellow MVP. We talked all about Teams Phone and market fit and what customers it suits, and also talking about where it fits in SMB and mid market and some of the challenges there. Really interesting conversation.
Thanks to Mark for that. We also have some product briefings. We looked at Landis Attendant Console, and I actually installed it live on my tenant. 103 seconds to install, demo and have running, which is pretty impressive. And also with Oli at Luware, we talked about the five common contact center asks from his customer meetings.
So what are customers actually asking for versus what is the industry saying? And finally, a white paper with AudioCodes on Voca.
That white paper talks about the contact center market and how to make your decision between the certified vendors and also some of the Voca use cases.
We've also had a lot of good podcasts published over December and the start of January. So we had a bit of a deep dive into thoughts on Teams Phone for 2025 with Irwin Lazar at Metrigy, which has gone down really well. I also really enjoyed the customer conversation with Charles Mason at TP ICAP. He gave us a lot of insight into deploying Teams Phone and Rooms in a financial and some of the challenges and pressures there are there. Hope you enjoy the podcast. Do check them out. And if you've got any feedback on them, do let me know.
On to the news. So first up we are getting SMS in Teams.
So at the moment it will only be for calling plans for US and Canada. So not for OC, not for DR, there's nothing on the near term horizon for those. But for calling plans, you will be able to enable the ability to send and receive SMS, and essentially phone numbers will show up like contacts in chat, and you'll be able to send and receive SMS messages.
There is some admin configuration to do, there's some legal compliance around 10 digit long code, so there'll be some admin settings to set. We're still waiting on final details of commercial model and documentation.
Microsoft are planning to update the message center message.
It'll be interesting to see if people want it on OC and DR and where that is. But again, not on the near term roadmap by the looks of it.
Second big update we got is Microsoft Teams Live Chat. So this was actually previewed a long time ago at Enterprise Connect. It's the idea of a basic chat widget you can embed into a website. The customer talks on the website and on the back end it goes through to Teams chat. Really nice experience potentially.
This is aimed at the business customers, so the 300 seat and below customers. It is not an enterprise feature, it is only going to all the business plans. It's not premium, it's included in all those plans. Let's have a look at what that looks like. So on the top picture here, you can see the chat embedded on the website. I don't know, but I'm expecting that some kind of JavaScript thing that goes into the header of the website.
Then you can see on the second image, the chat coming through to Teams. I'll share more details that when I get hands on it's coming to US tenants in January and rest of world in March this is Teams transcription being turned on by default, Not that it will automatically be on for every meeting but that users have the option to use it and this is just like face and voice enrollment. Those traditionally were turned off by default at the tenant level. They are flipping to turned on by default. If you already set policies that turn them off at the user level, this won't override those policies, but it will override the default policy.
so the challenge here for Microsoft is most admins don't change the defaults. So this moves the model to whereby admins need to turn it off if they want to turn it off for their enterprise rather than need to turn it on.
. This one's a small feature, but I'm really excited about it. It really adds some great usability. And it's the ability to share a direct link to a meeting recap or an intelligent meeting recap. Just a little button in the recap UI that lets you share a link and you can share that internally within your organization, not externally, and it will still respect the permissions of who has access to that, so if they don't have access, you'll need to grant access.
I've been using this quite a lot. It's quite handy to grab a link to a recap and put it somewhere where you keep it as a collection rather than having to go search for that recap. Nice feature there.
Another little one but worth knowing about, voicemail greetings have changed, or it's rolling out now, the change. And this is just really tightening up a bit on security. So internally, when you leave a message, you'll hear the name of the person you're calling.
But when someone calls in from external on PSTN, they'll just hear the person is unavailable rather than Mark Smith is unavailable. So it's just stopping like a potential data leakage scenario of random dialing and trying to guess names. And that is rolling out right now.
Let's jump into Rooms and Devices.
So as we've talked about many times on the update, the AOSP updates are rolling out. AudioCodes were the first to get their firmware out just at the end of December, so those are rolling now. And others have AOSP firmware that's gone through the testing and is beginning to roll out.
There's a link here which has all the details of the vendors and when their firmware is anticipated to be rolled out and the details of what you need to do, you need to proactively configure Intune to ensure these updates roll out successfully. So do make sure you understand this. Nothing is being pushed out automatically.
It is manual upgrade for these AOSP updates. And ideally, you would test a couple of machines. Make sure your Intune config is right before you roll this out to the rest of your MTRs. Also in parallel to this, we got an update from Microsoft, just kind of reaffirming that you need to keep your Android devices up to date.
So from June 2025, devices with older than five months firmware will no longer work against Teams. So Microsoft is being more forceful around what was always really the guidance and the policy that you need to keep these devices up to date. And there are some particular changes coming around session flows, which rely on the latest firmware.
So you do need to make sure you're updating. So check out that Message Center message and make sure you have a plan around AOSP as well.
We talked about these updates off the back of Ignite, but they're now rolling out. So Microsoft Teams will get multi window support on iPad, which is a really nice experience improvement based on the new Apple Split View capability. And also already rolled out is the ability for iPad to support USB-C cameras.
So if you want to add a fancy USB-C camera, you can now do that on the iPad, . And this multi window update is coming out February.
One for Rooms, this is a nice accessibility feature, so this is the ability to have captions in your preferred language. So users receiving the meeting, sitting in the room, can set the language they prefer for real time caption translation. right in the room, which is really nice.
Admins can configure their default captions as they prefer and users can set those on a meeting by meeting basis as well. That is rolling out in February.
Custom names coming to Teams panels. This is a really nice one. If you have an unusual naming convention for the resource accounts for your rooms, you might want to put more friendly names on the panels and you'll now be able to do that. Default this is off, you do have to admin enable it, and it takes around 24 hours for those names to cycle through.
If you click on the little eye icon, you can see on there, that's the friendly name, you will see the full room name as well. But from a panel point of view, it will show the nice friendly name, which is good, and that's rolling out now.
An important support one to understand, Windows 10 is ending support on October 14th, 2025. Now there are options for both consumers and businesses to pay for patches to extend that if they want to. It's not recommended, you should be moving to Windows 11, but you can do that. But regardless of that, the Teams team are ending support for Teams Rooms and Proposal Management on Windows 10 devices on that date.
So even if your organization was planning to extend their Windows support, those MTRs will no longer be supported. Indeed. For most MTRs, it's not a big deal. They will upgrade to Windows 11 or they already have been automatically upgraded to Windows 11. But some of the older certified rooms from way back at the start, the Lenovo Hub 500, the Surface Pro 5, the old Intel Skull Canyon like NUCs, those don't have chipsets that support Windows 11.
So those will go end of support and will be out of support and need replacing. They won't be patched for features or security. Not recommended to keep those running. So be aware of that date, be aware of your inventory, and if you've got any Windows 10 MTRs, it's time to swap those out.
And talking of swapping out hardware, we've got two new certifications for 2025 already. First one is the Logitech Rally Bar with no radio. Why no radio, you ask? Well, this is for kind of governmental environments that don't allow radio frequency, don't allow Bluetooth.
So same kit, same great capabilities, but just no radio capabilities in the device. And also Owl Labs have had their Owl Bar certified, so that's another Android bar in the mix as well. Let's have a quick look at the Roadmap. Not too many additions to the roadmap, but I thought I'd call out the Queues App because some nice things have been added there.
So in January, the Queues app is getting some basic user capabilities on the Teams IP phone. So you have the ability to see what queue you're in and control that. I'm not sure how many kind of queues, contacts and the like type people are using physical IP phones, but the use case must be there. So that's a nice feature.
Also some additional , real time reporting capabilities at the service level coming through in February. See a screenshot here of those capabilities, which is really cool. And most excitingly in March, Barge, Whisper, Takeover, Monitor coming. So this is interesting because up until now, the Queues app has relied on call queues and auto attendance, particularly call queues, and their routing capabilities.
You didn't get any additional routing capabilities or media capabilities by having the Queues app. It was just a fancier UI over the top. This is where we split and we see different media capabilities, i. e. Barge, Whisper, Takeover. So it'll be interesting to see how those are deployed.
Are these special types of queues? And also what are the recording implications around that, because you'll be recording those sessions with your compliance recording. How does Barge Whisper work for recording is really interesting. I'm talking to some of the recording vendors about that, so look out for more details on that soon.
On to Microsoft Copilot. So there's been some big changes around Microsoft Copilot. Essentially, there's a rename and some additional features coming to all users. Microsoft Copilot. So what was Microsoft Copilot, quote unquote, with the enterprise data protection, which is included for all Microsoft 365 slash Office 365 users.
That is going to be renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. You don't need the M365 Copilot for that. It's just Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. And that Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is also getting access to agents on a pay as you go basis. Microsoft So SharePoint agents on pay as you go and also line of business agents on pay as you go as well.
So really expanding the capabilities of what the core users from Microsoft 365 slash Office 365 get in the box, which is really nice. So they'll have web chat and they'll have agents and there's details there of how you set up the pay as you go for agents. They still don't get the full M365 Copilot that is reserved for those with the license.
So office integration, the apps integration, the biz chat is all part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot license, but all users will get that Microsoft 365 Copilot chat. And also what was called the Microsoft 365 app, which you may have used on the web or desktop, but more likely you've used a mobile app.
that app will be renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot. So even if you don't have a Copilot license, you'll get the Microsoft 365 Copilot app with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, the kind of basic in the box functionalities. And then if you've got the M365 Copilot license, you'll get the additional app integration and you also get access to all of those agents, your line of business data in the chat, those kinds of things with that additional license.
So Microsoft continuing to juggle around these names and these capabilities. I think generally this is positive in terms of the features users are now getting in the box and on pay as you go, but a lot of user adoption work to get your head around this and also some configuration to do for admins to enable pay as you go if they want to do that.
Also for those more Teams focused, Microsoft will be proactively pinning the new now Microsoft 335 Copilot chat in Teams and in Outlook. So this will show up proactively as a panel, obviously in Teams on the rail, and in Outlook as a pop up panel. You can, if you prefer, you can configure this to not happen, details in the Message Center message there.
But again, Microsoft just trying to make Copilot front and center for users, even if they don't have that M365 Copilot license.
Last up, let's have a look at events. January usually a little bit quieter, but we have got some good stuff coming. I've got a webinar coming up with Ribbon with Matt, which I'm really looking forward to. The Teams Phone Community Connection are having a really good session as well. Check that out. MTD AMA and also our new Copilot Fireside Chat with Zoe and Kevin.
That's going to be really good. Dona's going to be a great guest on there. I'm super excited for ISE in early February. There's a lot of news coming there. Got a lot lined up, a lot of meetings, a lot of interviews, so there'll be some good content there. And also looking a little bit further out, we'll have the Microsoft UC User Group London at the end of Feb, where we'll be recapping all the ISE news.
So do check those out. If you're online, check out MTD AMA, check out the Teams Fireside Chat and Copilot Fireside Chat. And if you're at ISE, let me know, it'd be interesting to say hello and shake your hand if you're there. So that's it for January. Quite a lot of news for the start of the year. Thank you again to Logitech for their support.
Look out for them at ISE. They'll have all their great stuff there. That'll be really good. As always, if you have any comments or feedback or questions, do leave them below. Always great to hear feedback, questions and thoughts.
Thanks very much.