Welcome back to the podcast. This is my monthly update for October. Lots to talk about as always, if you want to see the video version and grab the deck and all the links you can find over Empowering.Cloud. Thanks a lot.
Tom Arbuthnot: Microsoft Teams Monthly Update, October 2024. Many thanks to Neat, our benefactor for this month. Really appreciate their support. They've had some exciting news recently. They've just launched their App Hub and App Hub Marketplace. And just this week, they've announced the Neatboard Pro. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the update.
So we are weeks away from Microsoft Ignite when normally the big news for Microsoft drops, but still quite a lot to talk about this month so let's jump right in.
Tom Arbuthnot: First up, if you haven't seen the latest on Empowering Cloud, we've got an expert briefing from the team at Microsoft around compliance and transcription. . I deep dive into the AudioCo's live platform with the team there. We look at the new Crestron Video Bar 70, which was recently certified. Ribbon Leap, which is their automation and testing platform that can clone configurations and perform tests before upgrades. Webex Cloud Calling, taking a look at the other side of the fence , and also unboxing the Meetup 2 with Randy Chapman.
. On the podcast front, we had some great podcasts, Dimex365 is really getting a lot of energy at the moment, and Chris Goodwill takes us through the details there. We talked to Tampa International Airport, who are an AVISPL customer, all about their Teams journey.
Really interesting stuff they're doing there with Teams and with AV. Teams Phone Mobile, a view from Harold at Verizon. And we talked to a customer in Legal and talked about the challenges of Legal, Interop, Multiplatform, and Teams Rooms.
Last week was UC Expo in London. One of our big events. Really enjoyed that. I did some sessions there.
I also led some panels which were really fun, and I got around some of the vendors talking about their latest innovation. I really enjoyed the show. We had an amazing turnout to all our sessions and our community takeover. So if you were there, thanks very much. And if you weren't, check out the videos to keep up to date.
First up,
, Gartner have released their Magic Quadrant for UC. Always interesting to see their perspective on the industry and where the key players are. As you might expect, Teams is up most to the top right, . If you want to read the report, 8x8 have the reprint rights. There's a link there. You can fill in your details and read the full report. Interesting read.
On to Teams Phone. We have three new features for Teams Phone. I did a bit of a discussion with Kevin Peters to get into the details of them.
. So first off, The ability to buy pay as you go calling plans from Microsoft for non U. S. users when you have a U. S. tenant. Bit of a mouthful, but there was a kind of gap in ability to purchase there, where if your tenant was homed in the U. S. and you had regional offices, you couldn't actually buy pay as you go calling plans for those users.
And it's all to do with tax implications. We also got callback for call queues. We talked about this a bit last month. This is the ability to do the press one to be called back in the queue rather than waiting. And that's included in Teams Core.
You can also use it in the Teams Queues app, but it is in Teams Core. And the Improved Survival Branch Appliance as well. On the Survival Branch Appliance, we got quite a lot of new features added. So the ability to make and receive PSDN calls is obviously there, but hold, resume, blind, transfer. And the ability now to do things like redirect a call queue or an auto attendant.
Still a few challenges with survival branch appliances at the moment. So depending on when the site goes down, users and phones have Up to 24 hours where their authentication token is valid and then carry on making calls, but it is up to, so depending on when their token was last renewed, it could in theory be as little as an hour before their token expires and their calling stops working.
Microsoft in the past has said that's being worked on, so keeping our eyes peeled on that, but great to see those new features.
Tom Arbuthnot: We've been tracking this for a while, but Operator Connect last month hit 100 countries and 103 providers.
Kevin on our team builds up Interactive Power BI reports. You can go to that free over at Members. Empowering. Cloud and you can see who's added which countries and also filter by the countries you need or the operator you want to see what their coverage is like as well.
One for the VDI customers, the Virtual Desktop customers, the new Teams is now available for Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365, this is using the new media engine, the same as the Windows Desktop client. www. So it means that we'll get better features, better support, and as things move forward, it'll be more in line with the Windows desktop experience.
On the roadmap, a new calendar experience is coming to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams . It's opt in at the moment, you'll be able to toggle it on and off. Targeted release is beginning mid November and expecting it to complete by next November. And at some point that will move from toggle on and off to it being the default as well.
Another niche one, but an important one for some regions. In countries like France and Spain, there are these requirements that allow users to switch off when they're not on shift. So you can't proactively send them messages or notifications when they're not working, and you can't expect them to engage when they're not working.
And this is the ability to limit access to Microsoft Teams proactively when those users are not on shift. So you can use this and you can combine it with quiet time to avoid those users having access to their corporate messaging outside of their shift hours. If you need that, more details on the Learn site there.
Also on the roadmap, this one caught a lot of good conversation on LinkedIn. You might have noticed in your Teams meetings, sometimes some of these third party AI tools join the meeting.
They follow a user and they join as a guest. So they're joining from external and they're listening into the meeting, making a transcription, taking notes. . Obviously, really interesting technology, but potentially you don't want those third party tools, grabbing meeting notes, taking recordings and doing who knows what with the data.
Microsoft But they're very hard to block at the moment because they're joining as guests. So unless you completely lock down Teams and they have no guest access, you can't really easily block them. You can't block them as bots because they're external, not internal. And what's coming here is an option, a meeting option, to have a one time passcode for external attendees.
So as you go to join, the email you join with will be pinged a one time code and you'll have to input that code. And in theory, that will stop the bots joining because they won't have the code. I don't think this will be the default for everybody by any stretch, but if you have meetings where you need to ensure they're really secure and you need to double check the identity of who's joining, I think this will be a really nice feature.
Another important one on the roadmap, Microsoft Teams voice and face enrollment is flipping from off by default to on by default in January. So this is the ability to enroll your voice and or your face so that meeting systems can know who you are for the transcription and for the roster and also for the noise suppression on the windows and Mac client.
where it learns your voice and zeroes in on your voice. So right now, as it stands, there's an admin policy to allow people to enroll or not, and then users optionally enroll. Users optionally enrolling is not changing, it will still require a user to proactively enroll, but Microsoft are going to flip the admin default from Microsoft Teams.
You as an admin still have a policy. You can still turn this off if you prefer if you do want to keep it off, you will need to proactively turn it off.
Moving on to Microsoft Places. We got a lot more detail recently. So this is Microsoft's kind of. outlook, Teams, Wayfinding, Meeting Booking, Hybrid Working kind of platform. So it spans Outlook, Teams and has its own apps as well. Microsoft Places will come in two flavors. There'll be a Places Core included with nearly all the Microsoft 365 licenses.
So no additional cost, you'll get the core capabilities. And as is the trend now, there'll also be a Premium option, which will have some of the more advanced capabilities, Intelligent Booking, Explorer, Spaces, Analytics, all the AI clever capabilities. Microsoft Places Premium will be part of Teams Premium.
So it won't be its own SKU, it will be part of the Teams Premium SKU, which includes Queues app, and meeting branding, and some security features, and some advanced webinar features.
And we got details that this will be rolling out in November. Keep an eye out on Microsoft Ignite for this one. I think there'll be more news.
Throwback to Skype for Business, for those still running Skype for Business, you now have less than a year of support for Skype for Business Server 2015 and 2019 and the associated clients. Obviously, Microsoft's recommendation is to move to Teams, but if you are staying on server, there will be a Skype Business Server Subscription Edition, which essentially will be a cumulative update that moves you into a subscription model, and you'll get patches, further CUs and security features.
Don't expect loads of features. Don't expect loads of investment. This is really to keep people ticking along who require a server based product. But if you are in that scenario, there's details there of what to do if you're on 2019 And we'll look out for that Skype Business Server Edition Q3 2025.
Onto Rooms and Devices. So first up, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows Update 0. No massive features here. Proximity Join, Dynamic Video Resizing, which we'll talk about.
A Preview Icon for using Cloud and Teleframe and Roster Grouping and also some fixes.
One of the bigger ones on that list is using Ultrasonic for Proximity Join. This can be useful alongside or instead of Bluetooth depending on what you want to use.
And the dynamic tile resizing is a really nice feature.
This is depending on the number of people in the room, the team's tile for the room will resize.
On the Android side, we also got a September 2024 update, no massive features this time, just a bunch of fixes.
We now have custom background images on Teams panels rolling out. So you remember last month, we talked about images on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. Now we'll have them on panels, which completes the branding story. If you want to find out more about how to do that, there's a good link there.
Looking at the Android roadmap, some highlights are the ability to remotely swap screens. So if Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android have been installed incorrectly and the screens are the wrong way around, you can flip those remotely. That does require a pro license. Report a problem on Teams Rooms on Android, you'll now be able to configure an email to get that detail to go to the IT team as well as to Microsoft.
That's configured in the Teams Admin Center. And the Net Promoter Score survey is coming to Teams Rooms as well. This Means in selected scenarios, the room users will be prompted to complete a survey and give a 1 to 5 of their experience.
Onto the devices news. First up, we have the Neatboard Pro. Neat just announced that at Gitex this week as we're recording. This is their latest gen platform on a 65 inch form factor, 50 megapixel lens and 50 megapixel telephoto lens for individual framing.
Microsoft They can do their third party DSPs on the Pro line as well. The ActivePen HDMI out. Really nice device. Looking forward to getting hands on with that. If you want to find out more, there's a URL there. Lodgy also made some announcements. So Lodgy announced their smart switching is now GA.
This is the scenario where they have multi camera and they can switch between the front of room and the center of room, their sight camera, depending on which one your face is pointing at. I did a good demo with Randy there. You can check it out. And they've also announced their Xtend product.
So this is extending USB C over structured cabling. So you can go up to a hundred meters. So you can set up BYOD scenarios or plug into Android Bar for BYOD scenarios over really long distances. I don't know anybody who has a hundred meter meeting room table, but if you do, you're able to do that now over structured cabling, which is really nice.
We also got a number of certified devices, the new view. So teams join meeting Hour. Join the team certified family with the meeting hour three the YA Bar, A 40 Ava VC five 20 Pro three camera, the Poly Studio E 60 camera and Lenovo brought a VoIP, wireless headset for teams as well.
We also got some big Copilot news this month. So Microsoft announced Copilot Wave 2, which is the combination of a whole load of feature updates. .
Microsoft plagued with the branding again so it is now Microsoft 365 Copilot not Copilot 4 Microsoft 365 and then they use Microsoft Copilot Chat.
Microsoft For the kind of free slash included version. So you've got Azure AD, you can sign into Microsoft Copilot Chat and use that, but you don't get all the line of business app integrations in Outlook or Word,
and when we're talking about Microsoft 365 Copilot, we're talking about Business Chat or Biz Chat. won't go through every single update in this video just for the brevity of time, but Copilot Pages was the big announcement where they had a collaborative loop page you could interact with multiple people while working with Copilot. There were feature updates for Excel, PowerPoint, Teams. The main thing was now being able to reason over the meeting transcript and the meeting chat when you're using Copilot.
. Outlook got prioritized my inbox, and OneDrive got the ability to interrogate multiple files directly in OneDrive without opening them as well. Microsoft also made a much bigger deal of agents and the ability to create agents and to use agents for line of business tasks and to be able to create them straight from SharePoint files as well, which is really interesting. Finally, let's take a look at events.
I've got a couple of good webinars coming up. I'm doing next gen collaboration with Ron at AVISPL. That should be really good. In person, doing a round table in London with Pexip.
You've got to be keeping an eye on the Teams Rooms Learning Hours. Those have been really good sessions I have a webinar coming up with Crestron, and we're getting into all their use cases for intelligent meetings. That should be really good. Of course, the big show is Microsoft Ignite,
and live from Ignite, we'll be doing Teams Fireside Chat.
Looking at Microsoft Ignite, here's some sessions to look out for. Specifically to our Teams and Modern Workspace, there's a session from Ilya, Peter and Kerry, which is effectively the kind of Teams Keynote.
I'm going to be there in person. I'll be keeping you up to date. And I'll be doing a roundup of all the news as well.
so look out for that.
I'm also excited to announce we will have a new Fireside Chat series starting specifically on Copilot. This will mainly be Microsoft 365 Copilot, kind of modern work Copilot. Zoe and Kevin, great MVPs over here in the UK are going to be the hosts and it will follow a similar format as the Teams Fireside Chat has been.
So that's it for October. Again, thanks to Neat. Really appreciate their support. Do check out the Neatboard Pro and their latest App Hub and Marketplace announcements as well.
If you're not on it, be sure to join the newsletters, get the latest news. And next I'll be at Microsoft Ignite. So look out for the Teams Fireside Chat live from Microsoft Ignite.. Thanks a lot.