Microsoft Teams Update - May 2024

Many thanks to Neat, this month's benefactor, for their support of everything we're doing at Empowering.Cloud. Neat offer a great range of devices for Microsoft Teams. And exciting news recently, they just launched their Gen 2 Bar. The Neat's Center also became GA, and they've got a new partnership with Shure, which we'll be talking about later in the news section. So thanks to Neat for the support. Lots to talk about this month. I'm just back from Comms vNext which was really great.

We got some more news dropping, even after Enterprise Connect last month. And if you haven't seen that monthly update, do check it out because we got lots of new feature announcements. We still got more news this month, particularly around the room space. So let's dive right in. First up, what's new on Empowering.Cloud? We've got a new Subject Matter Expert briefing on building chatbots with Copilot Studio.

Really interesting topic that lots of organizations looking at how they can use Copilot Studio to build chatbots around their own internal use cases. So be sure to check that out. We've got some new podcasts up. We had a good session with Richard from Jabra all around how Gen Z are approaching collaboration and the office and working together. And there's a great analogy I love there going from Tetris to Minecraft. So check that out.

Enterprise Connect thoughts and news and what's happening with AI with Kevin Kieller. That was a really good deep dive. And also the evolution of Enterprise AV and UC with Jason from Crestron. Thanks to those people, some really good insights. On the product briefing front, we've got some new briefings from Landis and their contact center. They're actually bringing AI to the front of the contact center experience. Really interesting.

And Luware, we're talking about their new omni-channel capabilities as well. Do check those out. And as always, if you've got any thoughts or feedback, or you've got some ideas about subject matter expert briefings, please do get in touch and Comms vNext team. Really enjoyed that conference. One I've gone to for many years. One of the key conferences for the Microsoft Teams community over in the U. S. I caught up with lots of vendors and partners and customers over there.

Just spent basically two days chatting with everybody. It was great. There's some video links there for some updates I got from different people. Got Matt Landis opinion on the Microsoft Queues app, which is really interesting. Numonix latest features, catching up with Oak too. Jimmy was over there and he did his Jeopardy session and check that out and he gave some hints about what's coming in the future for Teams training as well. AudioCodes and the latest contact center information.

And Karuanan was actually there as well. And we got into the whole community conversation. We've recently onboarded a whole lot of regional leads for the Microsoft Community Initiative. And that's all headed up by Karuana. So check that out. Also I did a session at Comms vnext on Copilots I got up to 11 4s and 15 ins, and I'm putting together a research paper which will go through all the different Copilots and their use cases.

So look out for that on the research site soon, free to access for the community. Okay, on to the features. First off, Teams voice isolation is now rolling out in general availability. This is an awesome feature available to all users rolling out now. You do have to train your voice first in Teams, and then it isolates directly to your voice.

So even if there's others talking in the background, whereas noise reduction or noise suppression will reduce the general background noise, Things like Humming of Aircon. This will actually isolate your voice. Really great feature and it's the same training for isolating your voice in Teams and for recognising your voice in meeting room scenarios as well. So when you see that in your tenant, do be sure to check that out.

It's a great feature for users who are on the road or in busy or noisy environments. Big news this month, we got the new Teams Rooms 5.0 rolling out, we've jumped to the five trainer versions and lots of new features coming. So this version brings the new Teams 2.1 client, that was the client that rolled out to users last month.

Into the Teams Room system, which gives us the same platform across the board for future, which is really nice, and also optimizes some rendering for audio and video scenarios as well. That rollout's run really well with the users. I've hardly heard any noise of people moving from classic Teams to 2.1. So testament to how robust that new client is being at scale. Remember, we're talking about hundreds of millions of users being cut over here. So exciting to see that coming to Rooms as well.

QR code to join meetings or start an ad hoc meeting or cast content. This will show up on the Teams Rooms display. You can run over with your mobile client, scan the QR code in your camera app, jump into the Teams app, and it will essentially join the room to the meeting and put the mobile in companion mode. Really nice feature. For all the abilities to type in codes and things that are useful, you can't beat a QR code. And most people seem to understand the concept of QR codes these days.

So pretty excited about that. Windows Autopilot Zero Touch Deploy in Early Access Preview. That's a really big deal if you're rolling out lots of Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. I'll talk about a tutorial on that shortly. Meeting Room Chat show by default in Gallery View, so you can see that on the picture just here. That will be the new default admins can configure that and it can be changed in the touch control. For me, I really like to see meeting chat in the display by default.

I use meeting chat a lot during meetings as a sidebar not to interrupt and it feels like the room misses out if they don't have chat front and center as well. 4K display support. This is not 4K video streaming, but this is if you've got a 4K Microsoft Teams or Windows panel, the iconography, the layout will now render in 4K, which is an important deal, particularly when you're getting to really big screens, you don't get those blurry icons. That's a nice improvement.

Optional additional passcode to join meetings. So this is a scenario where you have Microsoft Teams Rooms in a common area and you want to invite that room. So the meeting appears on the display, but you don't want anybody who's not approved to go up and touch and join that meeting. So what this does, this prompts you for the passcode and you go to join the meeting.

So only if you've got the invite on your phone or laptop and you know the passcode, can you join the meeting, which is a nice little security feature. End users being able to switch Intelliframe on or off using the stage and the roster. Just a nice little feature there to be able to toggle it on a per meeting basis at the user end. An improved UI for Zoom Join with Meeting ID, you can see it just behind me here.

It makes it easier for you to click and join third party meetings and join with Meeting ID and other services will be coming to that UI soon as well. Microsoft Ability to change language on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, you can see just above me here, there's now a language button for changing language. And Skype for Business support is depreciated in this train. So you'd have to stay on the 4X training if you wanted Skype for Business support.

I wanted to call out this great tutorial from Michel. Really great video on AutoPilot on Teams step by step and how it works. AutoPilot is a really big deal, as I said, if you're rolling out Teams Rooms on Windows at scale. And Michel takes us through step by step of how to set that up and how it works. Really great video, so do check that out on the link just there. And the link will be in the show notes as well. Another Rooms feature, Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Portal.

We saw this announced a while ago. This is remote access and remote control of Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Some OEMs do have this capability, but this will be baked into the Pro Portal, so it will work on any Microsoft Teams Rooms that run the Windows 11 operating system, which is most of them these days. And it gives you the ability to troubleshoot hardware and software configuration to remotely control. And it works even when the device is unattended.

So you don't need someone local to hit the button. Justin's done a little LinkedIn post there and he will be demoing this live on the Microsoft Teams devices. Ask me anything session which is coming up later in May. So do check out the Microsoft Teams, ask us anything, and we'll do a deep dive on what's happening with remote access and how it works. Interesting new AI meeting feature. Follow a meeting.

So in the new Outlook and the Outlook on the web people who are invited to meetings will get a new option to either say yes to the meeting, no to the meeting, or that they would like to follow the meeting. And follow is an indication that they want to participate and receive updates about the meeting, but they won't be directly joining the meeting.

So if everybody's using new Outlook, the attendees will be able to see that you're following the meeting, but you're not actively engaged in the meeting. For any users using Classic Outlook or the other Outlook clients, they'll receive a response as a standard tentative acceptance. And this is Microsoft going down the route of this concept of asynchronously being able to be involved in a meeting. So I can't attend, but I want meeting notes. I want to be engaged. I want updates.

All aligned to this kind of copilot idea of I can follow, get notes, get a recap, but don't have to attend the actual meeting. On the Operator Connect front, we've had a couple of new operators join the program. We're now up to 94 providers and 95 countries covered. That number still saying neck and neck. It's going to be interesting to see whether we hit 100 countries or 100 providers first. I'm betting on 100 providers. Really interesting that we saw 8x8 join the Operator Connect providers.

So they joined with 20 countries initially, 8x8 obviously being a UCaaS provider, but also offer a Certified Teams Contact Center, have offered direct routing for a number of years, and now offering Operator Connect as well. So serving their customers whether they are Teams customers or Hybrid Teams 8x8 customers. 8x8 have recently jumped on as a supporter of Empowering.Cloud.

So I really appreciate them supporting what we're doing and I'll be doing a podcast soon with them to dive in where they fit in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem and where they support their Teams customers, where they have their native solution, how all that works together. So look out for that soon. Also Convergia are joining as another provider with a decent amount of coverage from day one.

And hitting some of those harder to cover countries like Brazil and Venezuela., it wouldn't be a monthly update without something around Copilot. This month the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Success Kit dropped. There's a direct download link in the slides and the show notes. And this is a really useful kit to help customers. deploy and manage the successful rollout of Copilot.

Copilot I'm seeing with the customers I'm working with does need a lot of support, a lot of user adoption, a lot of training. It is not a product you can just fire out and expect users to pick up. And this success kit gives you different abilities to And this success kit gives you some training guides. It gives you some content. It gives you some assets. It gives you even a Viva Engage kind of template scenario to train your users.

So if you are interested in Copilot for Microsoft 365, or you are rolling it out for organizations or in your organization, do check out this success kit, pretty useful stuff. And also looking at the wider Microsoft 365, the new multi tenant organization capabilities, MTO capabilities are now generally available.

And this is Microsoft trying to do a better job of allowing organizations to run that have multiple tenants for different subdivisions of their organizations or different countries or different franchises. If you are in that scenario, worth checking out these MTO capabilities. There's a couple of links there.

It's still a growing capability, there's still more to come, particularly on the Teams front, but you can see where Microsoft are going here, and nice to see them investing, as there are many big organizations, particularly with things like mergers and acquisitions, that have multiple tenants to manage. On to devices news. First off, we got two new certified devices. We got the Neat Gen Bar 2 that I mentioned at the top of the call.

So this is Neat's latest bar with their new chipset and their new capabilities, improved camera sensor, really nice stuff. They also GA'd their Center camera as well. And you can connect the Center with the new Gen2 bar As well as the existing bars, really great stuff there. DTEN also released their new bar. So their second device in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. That is the DTEN DCR200 bar. Great to see that from them as well. And there's a blog there on the new Neat Bar.

Also news from Neat and Shure, they have a new partnership where you can integrate Shure's audio capabilities with Neat's solutions. Really nice to see this on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. With Windows you've been able to do different integrations for a while, with Android it's more limited, it involves The OEM is working closely together and it's great to see some of Shure's advanced audio capabilities, their ceiling mics, their handheld mics being integrated into Neat.

I caught up with both Shure and Neat at Comms vNext and we recorded a live podcast talking about the integration, the capability, so look out for that on the Microsoft Teams Insider Podcast soon. New from Cisco, we've seen Cisco certify a whole range of devices for Microsoft Teams, and they recently released some Cisco reference room designs with their different kits and capabilities. There's a PowerPoint presentation and a guide.

If you're looking at Cisco devices, then that's a great guide for how you might lay out your different rooms and solutions. Finally, on Devices, Jabra have limited preview released their Jabra+ for Admins, which is their new management capability for their Rooms devices. Nice to see this it's one of the key decision points when choosing devices is the OEM management capability, how that works alongside the Pro Management Portal capabilities.

I've got early access to this, so I'll be checking it out with my VBS and my Panacast 50. And when I've got a bit more understanding of it, I'll be doing a deep dive, so look out for that soon. On to Events. Big event for our Space, there is a new Converged Comms Partner Technical Bootcamp. You may have attended some of these in the past virtually. This one is going to have some in person capabilities in Redmond. If you know, you know, you've probably already been invited to that.

Unfortunately, it clashes with our Microsoft UC London user group, which is on the 19th in London. So I won't be over in Redmond, but I will be joining remotely. Three days of really good partner technical training. Do sign up to that and make sure you block out your calendar for that. That's going to be really good content. Looking forward to that one. Also, we have Kevin Peters on Teams Fireside Chat this month.

Kevin is Director for Teams Phone, so we'll be going in deep into some of the Teams Phone announcements, some of the stuff from Enterprise Connect. And Kevin is just a really good guy from the community, he was MVP before joining Microsoft, so he'll be happy to answer any questions and thoughts around Teams Phone. We also have the usual events coming out. We have Microsoft Teams Devices Ask Us Anything. I'll also be speaking at the upcoming European Collab Summit. Looking forward to that.

Doing Microsoft Teams Ecosystem, How You Make Your Choices. And looking a bit further out, we've got Build coming in May. That's more of a development show, but we usually get some good insights as to where the platform's going, and certainly some of the AI conversation will be a big part of that. I have an up and coming webinar with ENow, looking forward to that with Jay. And then 22nd of May, we have UC Expo Manchester.

I'll be doing a session with Martin Boam, we'll be doing a user group takeover. So looking forward to that as well. Me and Martin always have a good time going through the roadmap. We're going to do what's new in Teams, what's new in Copilot. So if you're in the UK and you're around Manchester, be sure to check that one out. So that's it for this month. Lots of room news this month. Really good to see that. Really exciting to see the developments there.

Thanks again to Neat for their support of everything we're doing at Empowering.Cloud. Really appreciate them and their support. As always, if you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, do let me know. Hope to see you at one of the events soon. Thanks a lot.