Microsoft is hosting a “The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI” event this week where they will no doubt start to talk about how their new ChatGPT-like AI will transform and adapt the traditional productivity apps like Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerBI, PowerPoint and of course Teams and Dynamics 365.
After announcing and making available in preview their Prometheus Model which is already available in the “new Bing” and Skype apps, last month, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro, are running an hour-long online event on Thursday 16th March at 3pm UK time (8am PT) to talk more about the AI in Modern Work.
There’s already AI in some core products
Microsoft Teams has been given some AI love already within the new Teams Premium included new AI driven meeting insights and auto action taking.
Dynamics 365 apps have also seen some AI capabilities announced too, to help human workers delegate tedious tasks to machines. This new AI automation tool come in a preview form in a release called Dynamics 365 Copilot, and Microsoft sees automated content creation and algorithmically driven behaviour to help employees using customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems streamline work.
“Copilot brings the power of next-generation AI capabilities and natural language processing to Dynamics 365, working alongside business professionals to help them create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions – just by describing what’s needed,” explained Emily He, corporate VP of business applications marketing at Microsoft, in a recent blog post.
What do you hope to see?
With the event just around the corner, followed by Enterprise Connect in a couple of weeks, what do you think will be announced.?
Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.
ThousandEyes by Cisco is a digital end user experience monitoring solution that helps ensure your business SaaS apps are running at optimum performance wherever your employees or customers are.
ThousandEyes proactively monitors, alerts, and provides visual “route cause analysis” within minutes of a User Experience issue, regardless of if whether the issue is the LAN, WAN, Internet, “XaaS”, ISP, Collaboration Service (such as Teams, Webex or Zoom), or Cloud Provider. It can even determine whether the issue is caused by any third-party dependency such as Content Delivery network, Application, Connector, Secure Web Gateway, Identity Provider, or firewall.
What is ThousandEyes?
ThousandEyes enables organisations to rapidly increase the responsiveness of support teams and managed service providers by providing end-to-end visibility and performance monitoring across the ever-changing and distributed IT landscape wherever your applications, data, infrastructure, user, and devices are located by. This helps organisations to:
Better support their hybrid workforce with near-real-time visibility of the employee’s experience.
Quickly identify and solve app experience issues by continually monitoring employee interactions with web and SaaS-based applications.
Gain end-to-end visibility from the user, across the network, WAN, and the Internet as well as to their cloud service providers and SaaS applications.
Cisco Thousand Eyes provides and end-to-end End user Experience Monitoring to help ensure that your employees / customers experience of your service or applications is “as expected” and helps proactively detect when there are issues which might impact this performance before users start complaining.
End to end visibility with Cisco ThousandEyes
Thousand Eyes provides end to end visibility and intelligence”. Its aim is to help IT provide the best possible employee and customer experience, whatever the application or service by comprehensively measuring and monitoring network performance end-to-end. This means that IT get complete visibility across the internet or WAN, edge, network, application, routing, and device layers to see exactly how and where the Internet and WAN connectivity is impacting employee or customer user experience.
Paying customers of ThousandEyes – and one of its’ killer features, is its’ ability to perform performance “snapshots” which provide clear-cut information – either on demand, or on a schedule. These can be shared with people outside your organisation and is pivotal to proving where the fault lies, therefore helping to help SaaS vendors troubleshoot their own infrastructure and it won’t be a surprise that many of the worlds’ largest SaaS providers are also Cisco Thousand Eye customers!
It does this by using “active monitoring” that utilises a software agent that simulates user activity and checks availability from multiple locations. Cisco leverage Thousand Eyes agents across much of their network equipment including wireless access points and switches (such as the Cisco Catalyst 9k), Cisco SDWAN solutions and SASE services, and is even incorporated into their Webex Meetings platform. There are also agents for desktop devices that can be deployed and what’s more you don’t need a Cisco network to use it. Thousand Eyes is proven to work well with leading SaaS and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Webex and Microsoft Teams.
Cisco Thousand Eyes – Image (c) Cisco.
The Synthetic testing constantly simulates user interaction with SaaS and Web applications, represented by a series of page loads interspersed with interactions like typing in fields and clicking buttons, making the synthetic test “feel” like a user to the actual applications under test. These tests are invaluable to application and network operations staff, since it helps IT and App Support better understand actual user experiences rather than playing the best guess or deflect game. These are presented back as “experience scores” which can be reported on, alert and track trends over time, providing an early warning before issues arise.
What problem does ThousandEyes fix?
In short, when an employee or a customer has a bad digital experience, they don’t care where the problem is, or what has caused it – they simply want to know what is wrong and when it might be resolved.
Marketing slide from Cisco ThousandEyes
The need and therefore market for this kind of tool is increasing, as the global pandemic dramatically accelerated the shift to the cloud and SaaS apps, and with the hybrid work, now just the way we work, we need a better way of monitoring and managing the end-to-end employee experience in an environment that no longer directly in control of IT!
As the world settles into what is now a hybrid work world dominated by the continual adoption of SaaS apps and work from anywhere mindset, visibility into how applications are performing for your employees and customers across the internet and various cloud services is critical to business continuity, employee, and customer experience.
Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.
Today, we, many organisations are still reliant on “self-diagnosis” (or no diagnosis), which leads to conversations like “it’s the network” or “my broadband is slow” or “XXX application is running slow”. This might have been ok during the peak of the pandemic when everyone was sent home to work and was “making the best out of temporary situation”, but three years on this from this, diagnosing and troubleshooting performance related issues is still too commonplace. Now, more than ever, the ability to monitor the end-to-end performance of your business apps, dictates the experience of your customers and employees and the excuses of before are no longer tolerated.
When an employee or a customer has a baddigital experience,they don’t care where the problem is or what has caused it – they simply want it fixed quickly.
Many of these issues are not new, but the shift to cloud and our new distributed hybrid workforce, means that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand and support the right “experience” using traditional legacy application performance management tools. What’s more the lack of visibility can often means employees and customers can be having a poor experience without IT or support evening knowing about it until someone complains!
Who needs ThousandEyes?
Do you have employee experience issues due to lack of Internet, WAN or SaaS visibility?
How do you know your Content Delivery Provider is serving your content quickly and consistently whether users at home or in the office?
Do you have inhouse web apps and need a better way of understanding how they perform? when your users work remotely or from disparate offices?
Does your IT help desk struggle to add value and provide answers to users experience issue with SaaS applications?
Is the lack of visibility and ability to monitor cloud apps, impacting employee productivity and/or customer experience?
If the answer to the above is mainly “yes”, then it’s worth looking at investing your time in a proof of concept to see how Thousand Eyes could help.
Why Cisco?
Personally, I think ThousandEyes is a great fit for any organisation with a cloud-first approach that has offices globally and leverages a high degree of hybrid workers (that’s most of us right!)! Whilst it’s not limited to those with only Cisco networks, the economics work well for organisations that already leverage Cisco networking, due to native integration across most of Cisco’s core product offerings including their Cisco Catalyst networking, SASE, SDWAN and their Collaboration suite (Webex).
This makes integration and deployment slick and negates the need to deploy additional agents, since Cisco include the ThousandEyes agent across many of their devices. Customers that buy into Cisco Enterprise Agreements also get a more competitive price point for ThousandEyes and from a support perspective it’s an integrated suite which means less finger pointing.
Speak to a Cisco partner for help
Speak to your favourite Cisco Gold Partner (I’m happy to help you need one) and they will be able to help demonstrate, deploy, configure, and support ThousandEyes for your organisation.
You will find your trusted Cisco partner can help in many ways including:
Demos, PoCs or specific product/application performance assistance
Cisco funded free trials
Help with business case development following a successful PoV
Scoping, deployment and tuning to ensure you can monitor all your in-house web and public SaaS hosted applications, connecting into your underlying Wireless LAN, WAN, MPLS, Internet connectivity and WFH remote locations to provide end-to-end visibility and end user performance monitoring.
Consultancy and support to ensure key departments, locations, users, and application estate is under cover.
Access to the best pricing through your Cisco Gold Partner.
See it action and find out more
Cisco provide free to access to this awesome “live outages site” where you can look at the live state of the world’s most popular commercial and consumer cloud services and see just how comprehensive and simple it is to use.
Microsoft is working on a new version of their Teams client that has been rebuilt from the ground up – according a report by Tom Waren over at The Verge. A preview of the new version should start rolling out in preview as soon as March and has been in internal testing with Microsoft for several months already.
The new version of Teams is a complete rewrite of the application, and in internal tests, is claimed to run at twice the speed whilst using 50 percent less memory, less CPU power, and in return be more battery efficient life than the current version. Microsoft had previously contacted their intent to move towards Webview2 technology from the the current Electron version and will also leverage React rather than JavaScript.
New Teams client performance vs old.
Power to the users
Teams now has 280 million monthly active users, up from 270 million monthly active users in January 2022.
Microsoft are expected to initially allow businesses (who represent the core of its user base) to have the option over when to shift to the new version of the app to ensure there is time to fully test the app and update users on the changes to the UI, to ensure that the transition to the new Teams goes smoothly. This will likely be a combination of a global setting, preview users and user opt in.
Premium AI features will bring further enhancements
Microsoft is also working on enhances to the newly released Teams Premium and have all ready shared their plans to incorporate more AI features into Teams which includes features like, auto generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and after meetin, personalised highlights.
Webex Contact Center is an Enterprise Class CCaaS solution that enables skill-based routing of inbound “call centre” type calls and is designed to provide a seamless end-to-end customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.
This is great for organisations, Microsoft, Cisco, and solution partners.
Great for Organisations
The Webex Contact Center Integration for Microsoft Teams combines rich omni-channel customer engagement capabilities with Microsoft Teams to break down barriers between contact center agents and the enterprise.
Whilst the CCaaS space in Teams is already quite well served by other vendors such as Luware, Anywhere 365, and Enghouse, Cisco Webex Contact Centre is a true Enterprise Class Contact Centre, trusted by many of the world largest enterprise organisations including EasyJet for example.
Some organisations who have been keen to fully embrace the potential of Microsoft Teams have often found themselves compromising on alternative “certified” CCaaS platforms. They can now have the best of both in a fully supported environment.
Great for Microsoft
In short this helps them protect their install base, since Microsoft certainly does not want to see their competition like Zoom, RingCentral, or Google muscle into their accounts base on the strength of their CCaaS offerings. By working with Cisco (as they are also doing in the Meeting Room space) they can now work more strategically together since Cisco and Microsoft already share around 90% of the same customer base.!
Adds a truly enterprise class CCaaS platform into the Teams ecosystem
Will further strengthen the partnership and collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco, the two leading technology companies that offer complementary solutions increasing the overall value proposition to their shared customer base.
Helps Microsoft expands the market reach of Microsoft Teams, which is already boasts more than with 280 million monthly users without (less) fear of losing market share to Cisco.
For organisations who require the best CCaaS solutions without compromising or mixing their collaboration and productivity tools, they leverage Cisco Webex Contact Centre without disrupting the flow of work for loyal Teams users with a seamless and integrated CCaaS solution from Cisco.
Great for Cisco
For Cisco this enables them to compete less and instead offer enterprise CCaaS services to their existing customer base who have been migrating or plan to migrate their UC platform to Microsoft Teams. Rather than risk losing out on the Contact Centre solution, Cisco can now meet their customers on their “turf“, providing the Contact Centre and CX solutions their customers need on their collaboration and productivity platform of choice whether that is Webex or Microsoft Teams.
Great for Microsoft and Cisco Partners
OK, so a little plug here for Cisilion (my employer), but for us (and therefore for me personally) I am excited about this because this brings an immense opportunity for Cisilion to leverage our unique position in our Cisco and Microsoft partnerships expertise and capability which will hugely benefit the services and solutions we can deliver to our clients.
As a Microsoft Teams specialist partner and Cisco Master Collaboration partner in the we are now empowered to deliver the best in enterprise CCaaS solutions to our customers alongside their choice of wider collaboration and productivity tools whether that is Cisco CUCM, Cisco Webex, or Microsoft Teams.
It helps us to attract and retain customers who are looking for a seamless and reliable customer service experience across multiple channels without having to shift partner due to technology choice changes.
It enables us to strengthen our deep partnerships and experience with enterprise class calling, meetings, platform and contact centres solutions across the two leading trusted technology providers.
Extends our ability to provide end-to-end design, implementation, integration, support and manged services across Cisco and Microsoft Collaboration solutions.
Enables us to provide cost and operational efficiencies both internally and to our customers.
Cisco Webex Contact Centre for Teams
The key outcomes that Webex CCaaS provides when integrated with Teams includes:
For the first time, brings a Unified calling platform between Cisco Webex Contact Centre and the organisations Microsoft Teams environment.
Allows for improved cross-function collaboration, knowledge sharing, and Customer Experience reporting among agents, supervisors, and other Teams users.
Advanced intelligent skill-based routing and queuing, which means customers can reach the right agent faster and more efficiently.
Providing a full and seamless customer service experience across voice, chat, email, and social media channels.
Delivers the core functionalities that high-performing multi-disciplined customer service teams require, such as call recording, voicemail, auto attendant, intelligent AI powered chat services, call back and rich social media integration.
Includes next-generation end-to-end Cisco security for Enterprise Class data protection and privacy in combination with that provided across the Microsoft 365 Security suite.
Brings exceptional management and supervisory controls and actional insights over “customer call handling”, with features like call analytics, call quality management, sentiment analysis, call control and full customer Lifecycle management.
Find out more
For more information about the announcement please see the following links.
The Yealink DeskVision A24 is a revolutionary all-in-one collaboration device that blends the best of innovate monitor and UC hub with a leading class Android powered Teams Collaboration display that can be used as a personal device, huddle or bookable meeting endpoint. The Yealink DeskVision A24 is a leading example of innovation in this space, integrating a 24 inch 4K touch-display, “pop-up” privacy camera, high definition speaker, wireless charging, microphones, and touch screen monitor to offer a best-in-class desktop collaboration experience.
if you’d rather skip to the video review – you can do so here:
The device costs £1,699 RRP which is great value compared to the competition on the market and adds to the huge line up of premium Teams and Zoom certified devices that they have to offer.
Yealink A24 DeskVision
Innovative, Sleek and Beautifully crafted
What I love about this device that sets it aside, IMO, to other devices in this space, is that the display can be positioned from 90 degree vertical to almost horizonal with it’s smooth arm, in motion very similar to that of the Surface Studio. This makes it idea for Whiteboard use as a second screen [though if it supported use of a Surface Pen that would make it even more awesome].
Yealink A24 DeskView in lay flat position
This is a really premium device – good quality, sturdy and functional. The look and feel is clean and minimalist and offers seamless switching between “Teams” mode and Second Screen mode. The movement of the device is also sleek and simple, offering full range of motion from vertical to almost horizonal making it perfect for different uses such as meetings, whiteboarding and collaborative apps – this is made possible through the unique light hinge designed to enable the screen to be tilted as needed in a very “Surface Studio” like design.
Using the A24 as a second screen (with touch).
For added usability, there’s also lot of ports to plug peripherals into allowing it to serves as a UC workstation complete with a USB hub (which could power and charge my Surface Pro) and wireless charger for smartphones.
Yealink A24 DeskVision rear
Yealink DeskVision A24 Key Features
Microsoft Teams Display running Android 10
Dual Display Mode (Teams Display and second screen)
Superior audio and video
Qi wireless charging for mobile phones etc
Touchscreen for whiteboard collaboration
Ports include 2x USB C (65w charge), USB C, Ethernet, headphone jack, HMDI In,
Wireless Connectivity
Bluetooth.
Leaders of the pack
At the launch of the device, Albert Kooiman, Director of Microsoft Teams Devices Partner Engineering and Certification said “Yealink consistently keeps expanding their portfolio with powerful Teams devices. These devices will offer sought after hybrid workplace collaboration experiences, delivering a great meeting experience combining quality Teams audio, video, and touch and inking, that can all be easily deployed across personal, hot desking and meeting rooms scenarios.”
As of Feb 2023, Yealink are the global market leader for Teams Rooms devices with a market share of [Source: Yealink].
Summary and Verdict
In short, Yealink’s DeskVision device is a great device that really can help bridge the gap between whiteboard collaboration and video conferencing device that can also serve as a really premium second-screen.
Through customer demos, feedback in the channel and colleagues, the A24 is real market leader in this (rather crowded vendor and product space) and delivers real people-centric meeting experiences and empowering meetings with all the capabilities and power of Microsoft Teams.
The device costs £1,699 RRP which is great value compared to the competition on the market.
I recently found an old RM Tablet PC from my days working as a Solution Architect at RM Education. After powering it up (it still worked), I decided it was time to write a back dated review of the device (which was powered by Windows XP Tablet PC Edition) that in my opinion, introduced and innovated the touch and Tablet centric world we are now so familiar with.
Education First XP Tablet Edition
In 2002, under the leadership of CEO Tim Pearson, RM Educationbecame the education launch partner for not only a new class of device that we now just take for granted. These devices ignited and innovated not just the education sector, but future waves of tablet and touch devices across, not just Windows based devices, but through to Apple, Amazon and Google.
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition was an edition of Windows XP built exclusively for this new era of Tablet PC computers with pen-sensitive screens, which was released on 7 November 2002. More on this later.
RM Plc Original Tablet PC (2002)
Windows XP Tablet Edition was full a windows XPs but also included various tools and accessories that could be used with a pen and included apps such as Windows Journal, InkBall, Sticky Notes, Office XP and Tablet PC Input Panel.
Microsoft also released an major update to the OS, Version 2005 (codenamed Lonestar)a couple of years later in August 2004 and both an OEM version and as a service pack update for the original Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.
Who was it for?
The RM Tablet PC saw three iterations – the original (pictured above) and an updated version a couple of years later and then the RM discovery tablet after that. These marked an evolution and true innovation in mobile computing world at the time – providing an entirely new interface and method of working that was natural, flexible and highly effective.
The innovative ‘slate’ design (totally unique at the time) focussed on leveraging the full power of a PC (Intel Celeron or Pentium M processors) into an ultra-portable device. There was no need for a keyboard and mouse – (though it of course supported it) and controlling the desktop was achieved through a pen used directly onto the screen, which incorporates the convenient and intuitive aspects of pen and paper into a radical new technology, along with new paper like apps like Microsoft Journal and the debut of Microsoft OneNote.
RM Tablet was build for educators and learners
In 2002 (wow.. that’s twenty one years ago) were the education launch partner for Windows XP Tablet and had built a tough, education focussed touch device that fitted well into the classroom (along with charging trollies to let teachers hand them out to students on a one to one ratio).
The RM tablets took mobile tablet computing way beyond standard laptops and current pen computing devices of their time, such as PDAs, by delivering a full Microsoft Windows XP Professional powered device that could be used either on or off the network (with 802.11b wireless) just like a notebook or standard PC. In fact, the RM Tablet PC exceeded existing PC hardware by utilising Microsoft’s most advanced operating system (at the time) with a version of XP enhanced specifically for touch and pen. RM also bundled their whole class teaching tools like Easy Teach worked a treat as teachers were already familiar with the software.
This was a real differentiator to just another laptop (RM Education used to manufacturer their own devices here in the UK in Abingdon, Oxford). Windows XP Tablet PC Edition included all the tools needed to effectively use the pen and touch through the OS, as well as many additional functions, including the added ability to annotate directly onto documents and text using ‘Digital Ink’. This is not to underestimated in terms of its innovation and revelance today. Digital Ink was the cornerstone of this now daily use technology, but at the time was a revolutionary new approach used across tablets, phones and covertable devices like Surface Pro.
This brought huge advantages to the classroom, and in my time working with Schools and Colleges back then, I witnessed 2005 some of the enormous impact it could bring, such as enabling students to use pen and ink in a digitial canvas with all the other benefits of word processing etc not taken away. Teachers used it for notes, printed onto whiteboards, removing the need for clunky overhead projectors that used to dominate classrooms.
IMO, there is no doubt that the RM Tablet PC opened up many possibilities for teaching and learning in ways that simply didn’t previously currently exist.
Life after Windows XP Tablet Edition
In many ways, as Microsoft often do, Windows XP Tablet Edition, set the groundwork and lot a fire for much of the next 10 years or so of innovation in touch and Tablet development which Apple, Google and Microsoft now dominate in their own ways.
With the release of Windows Vista in 2006, all Tablet PC components were then natively included with the OS itself without the need of a separate edition. This marked the start of the Tablet PC era from Microsoft which aimed to bring the best of touch and pen to traditional Windows devices without the need for a separate OS or dedicated apps.
Winding forward to today, 2023, tablet devices and 2-in1s dominate the workplace, front line workers, our personal lives, education and more. Apple have gone the route of dedicated tablets (with keyboards in some cases), whereas Microsoft have stuck by the original ethos that XP Tablet Edition started with touch and ink now firmly dynamically embedded within the Windows OS.
Did you know? : Windows Vista (which was seen as a failure in the eyes of many following the success of XP and the early teething and stability issues of Vista) was the seventh operating system in the Windows NT operating system lineup and was the version succeeding Windows XP and preceding Windows 7. It was the only version of Windows to later support upgrade paths from Windows XP and to Windows 7
With ISE 23 kicking off this week in Barcelona, the UC world will no doubt be excited to see the developments, fruition and live demos of Cisco tech running Microsoft Teams.
This is significant for several reasons. Of course, Microsoft can run Webex, Zoom, RingCentral, and others from within Teams and many of the Teams hardware from Yealink, Poly, Logi etc can also run both Zoom and Teams on the same hard hardware, but this requires a reboot of the hardware causing a less than slick experience.
Is Cisco Rooms on Teams the beginning of a bigger plan?
What Cisco and Microsoft have done differently is that with this partnership, Cisco devices will not only run Webex or Teams, but the Cisco Meeting room kit will be able to do this seemlessly withoutareboot.
Cisco Room Kit running Microsoft Team
It will be interesting to see if any other Annoucements this week suggest that other Teams & Zoom meeting room kit will be lookimg to do the same!
Why is this significant?
The big questions is why would Microsoft find value in this after all Microsoft now has close to 300 million monthly active users and is the clear leader in is this space which it continues to innovate with new services and revenue streams expected from the recent launch of Teams Room Pro and Teams Premium.
According to analysts, Cisco and Microsoft share close to 90 percent of the same customers. Not necessarily in the collaboration space but across the board. Where that is Cisco’s networking business or Call Manager or Webex, Security or indeed their Contact Contact centre (which is soon to be certified for Teams.)
Most organisations like the idea of a smaller number of vendors to work with and if they can standardise on Cisco and Microsoft for their meeting room technology (since Microsoft don’t make the hardware for their Teams Rooms), this could be a big advantage.
For Cisco, this also means that they don’t loose the hardware and maintainance on their room systems should their Webex customer base decide to move partly or in full to Microsoft Teams.
For Microsoft, I think this also means bringing Cisco in as more of an advocacy – protecting both their install bases from their joint competition in this collaboration and voice space – Zoom, Google and RingCentral…vendors both Cisco and Microsoft do not want to see penetrate or weave into their account base.
Is this really about CPaaS?
Cisco is betting heavily on the success of its redefined Contact Centre solution Webex Contact Centre which could become a real significant player in the CCaaS space for Teams users and not just Webex customers.
Since the partnership was announced at Ignite, just before Xmas, much of Cisco messaging has been around adding value to Teams rather than replacing it (though Cisco hope of course customers will still invest in Webex). The focus of much of the marketing is around making the user experience on Teams better by using Cisco technology.
Here’s where CPaaS comes in. This partnership with Microsoft is also a great opportunity for Cisco to leverage its broader UC portfolio to add their Webex Contact Center natively into Team, attacking the plethora and crowded market of Teams certified contact centres such as Luware, Anywhere 365 and Enghouse.
Organisations with Teams, looking to replace their contact centre solutions are continually looking at Teams Certified solutions.
The Cisco Webex Contact Centre is already a highly-regarded CCaaS solution, soon to be certified by Microsoft for Teams (maybe as soon as this week?).
Cisco Webex CC on Garner Magic Quadrant 2022
Cisco and Microsoft – Better together?
Only time will tell.. If the plan plays off Cisco should certainly be able to capitalise on market growth and their reputation and proven success in the CCaaS space. If they can secure Webex as the CPaaS of choice for Teams, this could significantly reverse the declining marketshare that Cisco has been suffering of late.
This will also help Microsoft block their other completion and prevent players like Zoom getting into their accounts. Together Cisco and Microsoft should be able to protect their join customer base making it harder for other UC vendors to eat their share.
Who might loose out to this partnership?
The Teams Room space is already well served by flexible, innovate solutions from the likes of Yealink, Poly, Neat and Logitech etc. For Teams organizations already invested in these brands, I see them sticking, but customers moving from Cisco to Teams now have the ability to reduce cost, maintain ‘brand’ and leverage thier investment and partnership with Cisco with less disruption, upheaval and change.
The CPaaS providers that develop Teams certified contact centres may be most worried by this partnership, since Cisco will now able to compete in their space which, whilst already crowded, lacks many true enterprise grade solutions like Cisco have.
Microsoft Teams Premium is a paid tier of Teams announced in October 2022 at the time of the Microsoft Ignite conference and is generally available from Feb 2023. (so now).
These additional capabilities (more info later) are focussed around:
Creating more personalised and intelligent meetings and webinars.
Improved and enhanced security protection for meetings
Advanced management and reporting capabilities for IT.
Advanced Virtual Appointments.
Deep AI analytical date provided through Open AI’s GPT 3.5
It costs around $10 pupm depending on your region, country and license agreement.
What are the differences?
Not to be confused with Teams Room Premium (now Teams Room Pro), Teams Premium is Teams add-on license that allows organisations that already have Teams with their Microsoft 365 subscriptions to further enhance their Teams experience with benefits such as more personalised and intelligent meetings, enhanced meeting protection, and advanced management deep AI and reporting capabilities.
Teams Premiums’ key features over the “standard” version included within Microsoft 365 can are summarised below. The data is taken from official Microsoft information, the source of which is here).
Meetings
Teams Premium provides additional features for customizing meetings including enhanced templates, customisable themes, company backgrounds and custom together modes and analytics provided through GPT 3.5 open AI model
Feature
Teams (Standard)
Teams Premium
Host and attend Teams Meetings
✔️
✔️
Experience Teams’ standard look and feel
✔️
✔️
Use standard & custom meeting backgrounds at user level
Teams Premium provides an advanced webinar experience for organisers, presenters and attendees.
Feature
Teams (Standard)
Teams Premium
Require attendees to register
✔️
✔️
Assign a co-organiser
✔️
✔️
Limit the number of people who can register
✔️
✔️
Read live captions during meetings
✔️
✔️
Turn on Q&A for webinars with up to 1000 attendees
✔️
✔️
View attendance reports
✔️
✔️
Integrate with Dynamics 365
✔️
✔️
Set up a green room for webinar presenters
✔️
Manage attendees’ view
✔️
Send reminder emails to registrants
✔️
Create a webinar wait list
✔️
Manually approve registrants
✔️
Limit the day and time when people can register
✔️
Allow registered users to bypass the lobby
✔️
Use RTMP-In for Webinars (coming soon)
Meeting Protection / Security
Teams Premium provides additional ways to safeguard meetings with features such as sensitivity labels, meeting water marking and end to end encryption which includes video, chat and content.
Feature
Teams (Standard)
Teams Premium
Manage meeting lobbies
✔️
✔️
End-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls
✔️
✔️
Moderate meeting chats
✔️
✔️
Control who can present
✔️
✔️
Add watermarks to meetings
✔️
E2E encryption for meetings with up to 50 attendees
✔️
Control who can record
✔️
Prevent copy/paste in meeting chats
✔️
Assign Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels for meetings [Requires Microsoft 365 E5]
✔️
Custom user policy packages
✔️
Turn on advanced meeting monitoring and alerting
✔️
Meetings Reporting
Feature
Teams (Standard)
Teams Premium
View recordings of meetings
✔️
✔️
View meeting transcripts
✔️
✔️
View and use files added to meetings
✔️
✔️
View and use apps added to meetings
✔️
✔️
Navigate meeting recordings with autogenerated chapters (coming soon)
✔️
View time markers in meeting recordings when you joined or left a meeting (coming soon)
✔️
Search meeting transcripts with speaker suggestions (coming soon)
✔️
View and act on autogenerated tasks from meetings (coming soon)
✔️
View when you were @mentioned
✔️
Virtual Appointments
With any Microsoft 365 license, users can use basic Virtual Appointments capabilities to schedule and join business-to-customer meetings. For example, users can schedule appointments in the Bookings calendar and external attendees can join through a browser without having to download Teams.
Teams Premium provides advanced Virtual Appointment capabilities, such as SMS notifications, custom waiting rooms, and analytics.
Feature
Teams (Standard)
Teams Premium
Access Virtual Appointments with the Bookings app for scheduling, appointment management, and email notifications
✔️
✔️
Integrate Virtual Appointments using APIs
✔️
✔️
Join appointments from a browser
✔️
✔️
Join appointments in Teams
✔️
✔️
Allow users to join a virtual lobby waiting room
✔️
✔️
Integrate with Microsoft Forms
✔️
✔️
Customize the lobby waiting room with themes and logos
✔️
Send SMS notifications
✔️
Chat back and forth with attendees in the lobby waiting room
✔️
Organizational and departmental analytics
✔️
View and manage scheduled appointments in the queue
✔️
View and manage on-demand appointments in the queue
✔️
Send post-appointment follow-ups (coming soon)
✔️
Who needs Teams Premium
Whilst not every organisation (or user within an organisation) may need Teams Premium.
Organisations can try Teams Premium by purchasing the zero-cost Teams Premium 30-day trial license available in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Organisations with a Teams Premium trial license will have up to 25 licenses to assign to users. Those 25 users can experience and test Teams Premium features as they become available. Also, the admin can manage Teams Premium features for the 25 licensed users. The trail will last 30 days after which the premium features ill be disabled unless a paid license is purchased for the users that need / want them.
Most organization segments can purchase and use the Teams Premium trial license, excluding GCC High and DoD tenants.
Beware: “Some” Teams features will also move to Teams Premium
Microsoft have advised that with the general release of Teams Premium (in Feb 2023), some Teams features will in fact move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses. To be fair these are mainly centered around advanced reporting, company branding and webinar premium features.
Features moving to Teams Premium are:
Live translated captions.
Timeline markers in Teams meeting recordings for when a user left or joined meetings.
Custom organisation settings: Together mode scenes.
Virtual Appointments: SMS notifications.
Virtual Appointments: Organizational analytics in the Teams admin center.
Virtual Appointments: Scheduled queue view.
Preparing for Teams Premium
To prepare your organisation for Teams Premium and to determine if, where and when it fits, the following are key IMO
Take advantage of the free (25 user) 1 month trail to ensure IT and your Client Success Teams can understand the user and admin features
Run a trial for key departments around the areas of most interest or value
Update or deliver end user training to ensure you get the value from the new features
Gather feedback from trial and live users to assess wider deployment
Keep your support team in the loop (so they can support your users with these new features)
In what Microsoft call “price harmonisation”, it has been confirmed that Microsoft will be aligning the pricing of their Cloud products and services (for example Microsoft 365) by introducing consistent global pricing for its services across the globe. For many regions, such as the UK and EU, this means price rises as the dollar has continued to fall in recent years again the Euro and Pound.
What and why are prices changing?
Microsoft are aligning costs (like they do today with Azure) to US dollar FX rates which means that customers will have consistent pricing reflected by the exchange rate of the local currency to the US dollar (USD), which is reviewed twice a year.
While a price increase is never well received, it is worth noting that this latest increase relates to their commercial cloud products such as Microsoft 365. Azure is already priced by on regional FX rates and is not affected by this announcement. Microsoft are simply aligning their commercial pricing in line with their competition and their other cloud services.
Countries that use the Great British Pound (GBP), the Danish Krone (DKK), the Euro (EUR), the Norwegian Krone (NOK), and the Swedish Krona (SEK) will all see a price increase from April 1, 2023.
“In the future, Microsoft will assess pricing in local currency as part of a regular twice-a-year cadence, taking into consideration currency fluctuations relative to the USD.
This will provide increased transparency and predictability for customers globally and move to a pricing model that is most common in our industry.
The Microsoft Cloud continues to be priced competitively, and Microsoft remains deeply committed to the success of its customers and partners.”
Microsoft
How much are prices increasing by?
Microsoft has confirmed that the price increase for the following currencies will be:
GBP: +9%
DKK, EUR and NOK: +11%
SEK: +15%
Microsoft have said they are committed to continuing to invest in their cloud services to “enable customers to innovate, consolidate and eliminate operating costs”.
Thoughts and Actions
While a price increase is never well received, it is worth noting that this latest increase relates to their commercial cloud products such as Microsoft 365. Azure is already priced by on regional FX rates and is not affected by this announcement. Microsoft are simply aligning their commercial pricing in line with their competition and their other cloud services.
This therefore represents a good time for organisations to do some “house keeping” to keep licenses and costs in check. For example:
Check 3rd party duplicate products you can displace (and use the services included in your Microsoft 365 subscription)
Check if you need the tier of license you are using. Would Microsoft 365 E3 deliver what you need? Do you need the same licenses for everyone?
Ensure you leverage Fast Track services or your partner to help you adopt and get best value of your investment in Microsoft Cloud
Speak to your licensing provider or Cloud Solution Provider to ensure you get the best commercial costs
As tech vendors continue to modernise and revamp their partner programmes to better align with the pace of technology, changing needs of their customers, demands around hybrid work and the continual digital transformation acceleration, Cisco have recently added six new solution specialisations which aim to further build and support their partner competitiveness as well as recognise and reward partners with specific expertise and capability.
Image (c) Cisco
The six new specialisations are tied to Cisco customer priorities and represent fast-growing market opportunities for Cisco and its partners in areas where Cisco has been investing and innovating. These are heavily focussed around Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Work and the solutions that enable these.
Cisco’s Solution Specialisations
The new solution specialisations are one of the four categoriesof partner specialisations available to qualified Cisco partners, like Cisilion to demonstrate their expertise to customers, including:
Architecture specialisations: demonstrate product expertise in specific technology areas.
Solution specialisations: demonstrate that a partner excels at delivering value with Cisco solutions, including cross-architectural offers prioritized by customers.
Cisco Powered Service specialisations: convey partner proficiency in delivering managed services and as-a-service offers.
Business specialisations: focused on horizontal business practices that are essential to supporting customers’ business goals.
Partners that achieve solution specialisations are recognised and rewarded based on the value delivered to customers. The requirements for each specialisation are tied to knowledge and experience, allowing partners to capitalize on their existing investments with Cisco.
The relevance of the new Solution Specialisations
Cisco say their solution specialisations are designed to “showcase partner value to customers and represent the type of solutions partners are selling today“. These specialisations (which are not simple to earn and retain), reflect how Cisco partners, like Cisilion, are using cross-architectural solutions to solve their customers’ biggest challenges (such as how to address the challenges or hybrid work) rather than just simply selling and deploying technology products. Cisco say that “the specialisations are awarded to partners that can demonstrate how they are working collaboratively with Cisco to help solve customer challenges such as balancing an organisation’s security needs with the flexibility employees want, providing the best digital experience or consistently delivering a secure user experience from anywhere.“
Specialisation is ranked number one as the initial critical partner selection criterion for 74 percent of customers. By tying solution specialisations to customer buying criteria, Cisco makes it easier for customers to identify which partners to work with.
Full-stack Observability (FSO): Which highlights partners expertise in centralising and correlating application performance analytics across the full IT stack. This includes integrations across Cisco’s AppDynamics, Thousand Eyes, Intersight, and Secure Application. Partners with this specialisation can demonstrates expertise in prioritising actions to deliver superior customer experiences, drive revenue streams, and accelerate digital transformation for their customers.
Hybrid Work from Office: Which recognises partners for their skills and experience helping customers evolve traditional on-site and off-site work models, with solutions that power hybrid work, enabling people to work safely and securely from home, the office, and anywhere in between on any given day or time.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): Which highlights partners’ ability to help their customers to securely enable the growing universe of roaming users, devices, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps without adding complexity or reducing end-user performance.
Hybrid Cloud Computing: Showcases partners that provide customers with simple, secure hybrid cloud computing experiences at home, in the office, or anywhere.
Hybrid Cloud Networking: Recognises partners that securely and efficiently connect and manage customers’ data, workloads, and applications across data centres, edge, and multiple clouds.
Hybrid Cloud Software: Demonstrates expertise in managing operational complexity by helping customers streamline and unify IT operations with secure, hybrid cloud management software.
Benefits for Customers and Partners
The main benefit is that this approach takes away from an old-skool technology/product sell that was all about speeds, feeds, features, and cost, and instead encourages partners to have more meaningful “outcome-based conversation“. Cisco say this should help partners do what they do best – having a more “unified solution strategy” conversation with customers where technologies integrate and work together to provide solutions that are better than the sum of the parts.
Examples of this include the alignment between Cisco’s Webex video, calling and meeting services, the network infrastructure layer, the edge, and the Internet with integrated full stack visibility across these layers to ensure the best user experience whilst simplifying IT operations through management and support.
The Yealink BH76 Teams certified headset is a premium Bluetooth headset featuring active adaptive noise cancelling, HD audio, retractable microphone, 35 hours talk time and 40 hours of battery life. The BH76 is Teams certified and also features wireless charging, has an array of smart sensors, and comes in black or light grey.
Price is circa £279 RRP.
Key features of Yealink BH76 headset
In the box
In the box you get everything you need including:-
Leather carry pouch
Yealink BH76 Teams Certified Headset
Bluetooth 5.1 USB-A dongle (or USB-C) dongle
USB-A to USB-C cable
Charging Stand and power cable
Getting started manual / guide.
Ease of use
This is no budget headset. Everything from the brushed metal finish to the soft cushioned leather earcup and support is premium.
Powering on the device requires a two second push on the power button, after which an audio described “power on” message is heard, followed by another audio notification of the battery power remaining. Pairing is simple with a three second push on the power button to enter pairing mode and then simply go to Bluetooth settings on your laptop or phone.
Sensors in the headset detect when you are wearing it and as such, taking the headset off when listening to music or video, automatically mutes the headphones and pauses the music/video which them resumes again when you pop it back on.
For Microsoft Teams users, there is a “Teams” button on the top of the left ear piece (this is quite easy to miss however). Pressing this, opens the Teams app is not already open. According to Microsoft, Teams Certified devices with the Teams buttons light up when connected to Teams, and provide additional teams controls -the BH76 does not appear to do this – the button also does not do anything. This appears to be a Microsoft issue though (not a Yealink one) and there is a tech community thread here if you are interested.
Yealink provide a management app which can be used to manage all your Yealink devices, update settings and firmware etc., and for IT teams, the BH76 can be managed centrally from the Yealink Management Console along with your Teams Room devices and phones.
Audio Quality and Noise Cancelling
Sound Quality when listening to music is clear and sharp. The headset isn’t super loud compared to headsets from the likes of Bose or even Surface Headphones, but more than loud enough. You can also adjust the max volume settings in the Yealink app
The BH76 includes three levels of noise cancelling (off, ambient noise and noise cancelling), which can be adjusted by a small button on one of the ear cups.
Noise cancelling can be hard to test without a remote participant of course, so I used a colleague to help me out (thanks Adam). I performed the standard ruffling of a crisp packets and tapping of keyboard. Feedback was that he could only hear my voice and couldn’t hear the other background noises at all.
The noise cancelling is fully adaptive, and the levels automatically adjust based on the level of background noise detected. This is achieved using five microphones around the headset which create an “Acoustic Shield” that senses how far away and how loud sounds are to allow it to filter out background noises, leaving your voice loud and clear. This is essential for use in noisy offices or coffee shops for example.
Changing advanced settings on the BH76 headset
Other audio and sound settings (such as noise exposure limits, and fine tuning ACN) can be configured using the Yealink USB connect software – as shown above ⬆️
Microphone Boom
To aid in audio pick up, the microphone boom extends out from the right ear cup. When not in use, this can then be conveniently popped back away into the ear-cup, which makes it look more like a conventional stereo headset and of course ensures the mic boom does not get knocked or broken. If you push it away when on a call, it also mutes the microphone.
Comfortable and simple to use
Unlike other headsets I have tried and used over the years, the Yealink BH76 headset is really comfortable, even if you find yourself in the office on calls all day! I found that even after 4 hours of wearing, I did not feel any discomfort and almost forgot I had them on.
Simple to use too – The Yealink BH76 is really easy and intuitive to use too. I did find that the button placement took a little getting used to, since the buttons are a little small for my fat fingers, but it’s simple enough to use. Personally, I would liked to have seen more controls on the ear cups themselves rather than on the cup body (but suspect this is a personal thing).
The device supports Bluetooth pairing with 2 devices simultaneously, or you can use the USB cable that ships with device to plug in via the wire. Yealink provide a BT51 Bluetooth dongle too which provides the best connectivity and “makes the device” Teams Certified. I’m personally not a fan of dongles (I loose them), but Microsoft are slowly working to remove the need for dongles.
Charging and Storage
You can order the BH76 headset with the optional, yet highly useful charging stand. This uses a power cable (not USB powered unfortunately) and provides a convenient stand for your headset when not in use.
The base of the stand also serves as a wireless charger for your phone/tablet and of course your Yealink Headset which means no fumbling around for cables and free USB ports on your laptop.
Summary
In short – a really great quality headset with excellent battery life, good audio and great acoustic fencing qualities. There a few cosmetic improvements I’d like to see in the next version but over all, would recommend to anyone for hybrid work.
Cisco’s Desk Camera 4K camera is small, powerful and full of AI features (if you use Cisco Webex) and is also now officially certified for Microsoft Teams.
Cisco is no stranger to making high quality audio and video devices for video conferencing on their Webex platform – but with their partnership with Microsoft around building devices “made” or “certified” for Microsoft Teams a bunch of premium devices now have another route to market.
I’m lucky to have both the new Cisco Desk Camera 4K and Cisco WS-720 series headset which has recently been certified for Teams and even has the Microsoft Teams “button” on the earcup. The Cisco Webex variant has a Webex button.
This is a review of the Cisco Desk Camera 4K.
Cisco Desk Camera 4K
Cisco Webex Desk Camera 4K
The Cisco Desk Camera 4K, is a premium USB web camera for video conferencing, video streaming, and video recording. The camera provides up to 4K Ultra HD at 60 FFS video and features high-definition audio along with dual microphone for great audio pick-up on all your video meetings or streaming and is certified for Cisco Webex and also Microsoft Teams.
The HD camera comes with a range of features to make meetings from anywhere feel more professional and well-managed, including autofocus, low light management, and a custom field of view to suit your office demands. The system also works seamlessly with the Cisco Webex collaboration environment as well as now Microsoft Teams though there isn’t really anything it does in Teams that any high-quality webcam can’t do.
This is a high quality, premium device – features include:
4K Ultra HD camera quality (Windows Hello®️ Certified)
Two built-in microphones
Support for 30FFS and 60 FPS
13MP image sensor
Automatic focus adjustment
Adjustable field of view
Multiple pre-sets (controlled via Cisco Desk Camera App)
Built-in background noise reduction
Physical Privacy shutter
Digital zoom and correction controls
USB plug-and-play functionality
Clip mounting for easy setup
Cisco Webex Certified
Microsoft Teams Certified
Whilst certified for Webex and Microsoft Teams, the Desk Camera can of course be used with any video conferencing aps or streaming services and works nicely as on Xbox! The fast autofocus, face detection (where supported by the apps) and 10x digital zoom really help to enhance the video experience for your remote attendees.
Getting set up
To get started on Windows devices, set-up is as simple as plugging it via USB-C or USB-A with the supplied cables (Cisco provide both in the box for good measure).
The camera itself has an adjustable clip with a tripod screw thread offers mounting flexibility on a laptop, an external display, a tripod, or a desk stand in various open office spaces, huddle rooms, and home offices.
It is a shame there is no carry pouch for the camera though to stop it getting dirty or scratch when travelling.
To customise and configure the device beyond the factory standards, you need to install the Cisco Desk Camera app.
Install the Webex Desk Camera App
The Cisco Webex Desk Camera App provides a host of controls to change all aspects of the device as well as manage firmware updates, which mine was eager to update once connecting to the software. You don’t need to install it to use the camera, but it if you want to change the settings and manage the hardware then you need to!
Within the app it is possible to camera, image and microphone settings such as camera zoom levels (and pre-sets), field of view, auto focus settings and even framerate and resolution.
The Cisco Desk Camera app works with the camera and allows you to record videos, take snapshots, customise the camera settings, and upgrade the firmware.
Using Desk Camera 4K within Teams meetings
As expected, the quality and sharpness of both audio and video within Teams was good. to evaluate this of course I had to seek feedback from remote colleagues which was positive. By that, my video image was clear and sharp – even when sat across the other side of the room with the camera zoomed in. Even 3m away from the camera (which I wouldn’t do when working at home), video and audio pick up was good. It is nice to have such high-quality mics in a webcam – great if you have a more “budget” laptop without premium mics.
Despite the camera supporting 4K, most video meetings services (including Microsoft Teams) only support 1080p. To test the video quality, I move to the back of my office and zoomed the camera in (around 3m). The image quality was pretty good (seeing as this isn’t a room camera. Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams itself doesn’t currently have people tracking or auto-zoom so I had to manually zoom the camera using the Desk Camera app.
You can see the video quality at both close and zoomed in the images below from a Microsoft Teams call.
Close up (left) and 3m (ish) zoom (right)
Using Desk Camera 4K within Webex
The Desk Camera 4K really comes to life in Cisco Webex. Webex provides full access to device controls and settings directly via the app (as well of course within the Camera app). Within Webex, you get access to various settings from within the app.
Webex Video Controls (in app).
Device Management
Cisco have ensured that managing an army of Cisco desk cameras is simple, with integrations with the Webex Control Hub which allows for easier remote management. Today, no such controls exist within the Microsoft Teams Admin console for managing Teams webcams – though I have not tried adding the camera to a Teams MTR to see what I can do here.
The Microsoft Teams client offers limited controls over camera features and settings other than the ability to change basic controls – for everything else, you need to use the Webex Desk Pro camera app.
Webex on the other hand, provides more controls for their intelligent hardware. It will be interesting to see if some of this makes its way into Microsoft Teams since a large part of the partnership between Cisco and Microsoft is also around sharing best practice across the leading eco systems. Cisco also allow you to access advanced camera controls directly from the Webex app meetings app – which is really useful.
Verdict: Why buy the Cisco Webex Desk Camera?
With the many different options available out there for professional webcams then the Cisco Desk Camera 4K is definitely one to consider. This is no is a state-of-the-art webcam solution created for business users (or serious vloggers) who want to ensure they have the best possible video quality in meetings or when streaming video. The Desk Camera 4K is really small and compact too so easy to mount on your home monitor or perch over your laptop lid if you need to. It also supports up to 60 frames per second.
As a USB powered device, this camera is ideal for hybrid work (if you have a cheaper laptop with poor webcam). Whilst certified for Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams, it can of course be used with video conferencing or streaming tool (as long as it’s supported by the OS).
The camera also supports Windows Hello®️ for business for passwordless and secure sign-on for Windows 10 and Windows 11.
When used with Cisco Webex, you also get access to smart AI enhancements such as facial recognition, tracking, auto adjustment, and more – so if you are a serious Webex user, this is definitely a webcam you want to test out.
Whilst not something that ever appeared on the official Microsoft Teams Roadmap, Microsoft last week, announced and released the “Games for Work app” to both commercial and education customers. The Microsoft 365 blog article on the matter said….
“Playing games with coworkers has a powerful ability to foster relationships and collaboration. With the move to remote and hybrid work, our social capital has weakened, impacting cross-group collaboration and employee retention.”
Microsoft 365 Blog
What is Games for Work?
Games for Work is an app developed by Microsoft Casual Games and initially includes four classic Windows games: Solitaire, Minesweeper, Wordament, and Icebreakers, all of which can be played individually or with up to 250 multiple players.
Using Games for Work in Teams
As with all Teams app, the Games for Work shows up under apps in the Teams admin center, and before employees can launch the app, there needs to be a Teams app permission policy assigned to the user for them to use it (unless already permitted via a higher-level policy).
Once a user has access to the app, they can add Games for Work to their meetings before or during a meeting, just like any other app. Meeting co-organizers and presenters can also install apps in meetings.
Adding “Games for Work” to a Team or Chat
Once a user has been given access to the app, they can add Games for Work to a meeting before or during a meeting, just like any other Teams app. Meeting co-organisers and presenters can also install apps in meetings.
Adding Games for Work to Teams Meeting
Choosing and Launching a Game: When Games for Work launches, the app takes centre stage in the shared content area, just like any other shared app like whiteboard or PowerPoint would do.
Starting “Games for Work”
Once the Games for Work app opens, it connects to the Microsoft Games online site and the meeting host (or an organiser) selects the game they wish to play and launches it. As other members join the meeting the host can share their screen to agree which game is plays or launch their choice of game and wait for other members to join.
“Games for Work” in play
To Stop a Game: To stop playing, the user who starts the app (the host) stops sharing. Attendees can also leave the game at any time (to do some real work perhaps!)
Blocking Access to Games for Work
The most straightforward way to prevent employees using Games for Work is to simply ensure IT “block” the app. If it is decided to allow some employees to use the app, then a custom policy will be needed and applied to a group that contains those users.
Another thing to bear in mind is that different users may have different app permission policies (especially in larger organisations). As such it is possible that not everyone in a meeting will have access to Games for Work. If this is the case, they will receive a generic error message asking them to speak to their Teams administrator or call the help desk.
Verdict and Thoughts
Personally, I’m not sure about this and think many organisations will want to remove or block this functionality (which you can do). Microsoft believe, however that “playing games with co-workers in Teams meetings will foster relationships and build collaboration”.
I’m sure many will say that “Games for Work” may help people to relax (or take a break) but I’m sure there are better ways than adding games to a Teams meeting. This is not a pandemic “Zoom party” with your friends!
The cost of real estate for business is the second largest recurring cost item (first is people) and can often be more than 20% of annual costs. Since even before the pandemic, though fueled hugely because of hybrid work practices, organisations are looking for ways to be smarter with this space and better understand, plan, and manage these expensive costs.
As we talk about ways to optimise cost within an organisation, we often think about cost optimisation with regards to cloud spend, consolidating vendors, smarter hiring and moving more power hungry, space consuming data centres to cloud.
Announced at this year’s Microsoft Ignite Conference, Microsoft Places could be the redeeming feature large organisations need to help optimise their office real estate both now and for years to come.
What is Microsoft Places?
Hybrid work promises us the best of all worlds. The ease and comfort of working from home, the connection and energy of engaging with our coworkers in the office, and the flexibility and opportunity of working where we want. But today, there are still challenges preventing this promise from becoming a reality.
Microsoft Places is a new (coming in 2023) connected workplace platform that promises to deliver on the promise of blending the best of hybrid and in-person work. Microsoft places is a new platform (yes, platform not product), that will deliver solutions that help organisations coordinate where work happens, modernise the office with intelligent technology, and optimise the workplace for the continuing ever-changing needs.
Microsoft Places – Video: Microsoft
I said before, Microsoft Places is not a product – it’s a suite of products and services which will slowly embed themselves across the wider Microsoft 365 services like Team and Outlook which is where people spend their time. In short this is all about making the office space are more responsive to everyone’s needs.
Image: (c) Microsoft
Microsoft Places, aims to intelligently leverage signals, data and building systems to provide a truly connected workspace experience, bringing the best employee experience, through a single, unified platform which builds upon the building and technology infrastructure to create an environment which can adapt to serve the unique and changing needs of hybrid work and allows leaders and facilities management to better plan and manage their real estate.
The key services will include:
Hybrid scheduling – which will leverage common data signals from Outlook and Teams to allow employees to view their week(s) ahead and see when co-workers and others you need to work or collaborate with are planning to be in the office.
Intelligent booking for meetings – will help employees discover available spaces with the right technology to match your meeting purpose and mix of in-person or remote participants. This will also feature recommendations for the shortest commute times, along with prompts that provide guidance on when to leave the office for next meeting and ensuring you don’t get booked back-to-back when you have in person meetings to travel to.
Wayfinding – will help employees quickly find the right meeting room, which is key for larger organisations with many locations, buildings, and rooms. Employees will be able to see live interactive maps from their mobile device that guides them to the to the right location.
Hot desk booking – will mean that employees can see choose where to sit and reserve desks or rooms accordingly. Updates to Microsoft Teams Rooms will bring more inclusive features for hybrid meetings such as auto-framing, content capture and more.
Meet-ups – will allow employees to easily create impromptu meetups and share with others in the office.
Mock-up of Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft
Insights and Data for Leaders
Since all this will leverage the wider Microsoft 365 suite and power of the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Places will provide a plethora of data driven insights such as utilisation data, energy-saving opportunities, and occupancy trends to better manage the physical space.
This data will help leaders and facilities management make any necessary dynamic space adjustments on a particular day or week such as changing excess huddle rooms to overbooked collaboration rooms or converting meeting rooms into more hot desking areas.
Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft
This data will provide not only trends and usage data but will also allow organisations to better prepare, plan and optimise the real estate they have available and how it’s used to maximum potential. This may include reducing available floors on lighter foot fall days – saving energy expenditures and improving the workplace experience for everyone as well as working with managers and team leaders to better understand office trends around people, and spaces and places across their entire portfolio, creating more flexible, dynamic, and sustainable places that support new ways of working.
Working with Connected Spaces Partners
Since the building fabric, sensors and existing management platforms are critical to the success of a modern intelligent building, Microsoft have partnered with many industry and technology partners. This ecosystem of partners will build on top of the Microsoft Places platform with new and existing solutions, leveraging, and enhancing the rich data of the Microsoft Graph.
The list of partners (which will grow closer to release) include.
Accenture
Appspace
CBRE
Cisco (coming soon with DNA Spaces)
Conseco
EY
Honeywell
Johnson Controls
Swift Connect and
Many more
Availability
Microsoft say that Places will enter preview in early 2023 with general availability later next year. Microsoft will release more information on this over the next couple of months.
Like similar clickers on the market, the Microsoft Presenter + can be used to control your PowerPoint and PowerPoint Live presentations.
The similarity ends here, however, as Presenter + is the first clicker that’s also Microsoft Teams certified, meaning it can also help you control and navigate your Teams meetings as well as providing control over your presentations when using PowerPoint Live from within Teams.
Microsoft say that “Presenter + reflects how work has changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic“.
Presenter + costs ~£69 so is not the cheapest “clicker” but is the first designed to work with Teams and brings meeting controls into your hand.
In the Box
… Is the Presenter + device and a charging Dock plus the usual manuals etc. The Presenter + can also be charged directly with a USB type C cable meaning you can leave the charger plugged into your laptop safe knowing that should you need to you can top up the charge with any USB cable.
The back of the device has a simple on/off switch a Bluetooth pairing button.
Set-up
Set up is easy.
Un-box the device and turn it on (there’s a switch on the back)
If not already installed, install the free Microsoft Assessory centre app from the Store
Head over to your Windows Bluetooth settings and pair the device. It also accepts pairing to multiple devices which is useful if you use a different device at home to when out and about, and even remembers any custom settings you apply to it.
Pairing the Presenter + in Windows 11
Open the Microsoft Accessory Centre and follow the on-screen prompts to set-up the device and customise any of the settings you wish to.
Walk through of set up and tutorial of Presenter +
Controls and Use
Microsoft Presenter + is not just a PowerPoint clicker.
In addition to the usual slide forward and back buttons, there is an also a giant Microsoft Teams button that allows you to quickly join Teams meetings and do things such as raise or lower you hand when in a meeting without reaching for your keyboard or mouse, giving a much more natural presenter experience. Microsoft also say that you can use Presenter+ with most other meeting apps, including Zoom, though I haven’t tested this yet.
Also on the device is a giant mute button, which can mute and unmute your microphone when in a call/meeting, and the remote nicely vibrates when your turn mute off, so that you know your audience can hear you talking.
You are also able to customise the left and right buttons to your individual needs using the Microsoft Accessory Centre app.
Customising the buttons on Presenter + using the Accessory Control App
Another cool feature which sets this apart from other clicker remotes is that you can use Presenter + to grab and focus the audience’s attention with the screen pointer by pressing the middle 🔆button.
Summary
The is well built, presenter remote that makes Teams Meetings and Presenting within them simple and easy. I’ve only had the joy of using this in a couple of meetings so far and the true test will be how it enables me to true be hands free.
Benefits of Presenter + Image: Microsoft
One thing I wish it had, would be the ability to spotlight text/highlight text when presenting or zoom in / focus to a section of the presentation. It might be possible to do this via a keyboard shortcut programmed into the device, but I haven’t found a way of doing that yet.
Don’t underestimate this announcement. This news is huge in the world of collaboration. Cisco and Microsoft have always been competitors in this space.
For years, customers have been asking for a simpler way to achieve interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft Teams Rooms. At Microsoft’s global tech conference, Ignite last week, their asks may have been answered, giving customers the option to run Microsoft Teams by default on Cisco Room and Desk devices.
Cisco Rooms Powered by Microsoft Teams
Cisco acquired Webex back in 2007 for around $3.2 billion and used their leadership in unified comms to build out a world leading collaboration and conferencing platform. Webex competes with other collab giants including Zoom and of course, Microsoft Teams. This is not simply a “if you can’t beat em join em” thing though – there are some huge benefits to Cisco’s existing customers as well as to Microsoft and Cisco and their partners.
Cisco has been an innovative leader in the collaboration devices category for over two decades and their collaboration products have always been in high demand due to their design, reliability, and security. Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams will help any organisation considering implementing Microsoft Teams Rooms or those looking to move from Cisco Webex Meetings and Meeting Rooms to Microsoft Teams as their default collaboration and meeting platform, since they will now be able to leverage much of their existing Cisco Devices in the process.
The Teams experience you know, on Cisco collaboration devices you’ll love.
Cisco .
In short, Microsoft Teams certified devices from Cisco promise to unlock greater flexibility and improved experiences for business, IT and employees.
Why this is good for Customers
We see these three key advantages of this newly released partnership for existing and new Cisco customers:
1. Cost Efficiency and Choice
By retaining and re using the investment in Cisco Video Conferencing technology which powers their Webex Meeting experiences today, organisations moving to Microsoft Teams can achieve significant cost savings, not to mention time and effort, from not having to purchase, implement, fit out and deploy new devices.
Organisations that have already got an investment in Cisco Room Devices that will support Microsoft Teams Rooms, will receive a firmware update as part of the update schedule. Once deployed, IT will be able to factory reset the device and choose between the full Cisco RoomOS experience or tailor the software for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
Cisco Devices certified for Microsoft Teams | image (c) Cisco
This provides greater choice both now and in the future as organisations will be able to choose the primary meeting platform that meets the needs of their business without having to rip-and-replace the hardware.
Initially, six of Cisco’s most popular meeting room devices and peripherals will be certified for Microsoft Teams, with more are expected to come later in 2023. The initial wave of devices to be supported are:
(c) Cisco – Schedule teams Room Support for Cisco Devices
2. Simplified and familiar management
One of the biggest headaches when moving to a different eco system and vendor is around how IT provisions, configures and manages meeting room devices.
Managing Teams Room devices is critical to scale. With the Cisco MTR solution, organisations will get all the benefits of Teams Admin Centre (subject to whether they are leveraging Teams Rooms Basic or Teams Rooms Pro) along with access to Cisco Control Hub. Control Hub is Cisco’s unified cloud device management platform with an analytics dashboard to elevate your workspace with environmental analytics and API integrations leveraging the wider Cisco ecosystem including DNA Spaces, your building management. systems and ITSM platform.
This provides consistency for organisations already invested in Cisco Devices who are familiar with Control Hub and a powerful, intuitive management interface for customers who are new to Cisco MTRs.
3. Streamlined, yet, familiar user experience
Since Cisco is baking interoperability into their room systems, it means that not only will users will benefit from a native Microsoft Teams Room experience on their Cisco Room Devices, including full access to the full range of collaborative tools such as PowerPoint Live, Teams Apps and Polls etc, but they will also be able to still natively join Webex meetings on Cisco devices that are enrolled into Control Hub.
“By enabling the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience on Cisco devices, customers have the flexibility to choose the experience they want on the devices they love”.
Cisco
With Cisco RoomOS powering Microsoft Teams Rooms, users will get access to all the intelligence features they have ben familiar with in Webex such as the Frames Camera Mode, which uses individual framing for participants to ensure everyone is seen equally in any meeting. They will also be able to take advantage of Cisco’s audio intelligence [aka noise cancelling] which blocks out unwanted audio distractions. The camera and audio intelligence features will be available through device settings via Room Navigator in case of non-touch devices and the right-side swipe menu on touch screen devices in and out of call.
Being able to continue to leverage these great features, will reduce platform learning curves as well as ensure organisations are leveraging the value and uniqueness of the Cisco Devices.
Why this is good news for Partners
For Partners, like Cisilion who specialise in both Cisco and Microsoft collaboration solutions and services, we have also been longing for this to happen for years.
We see many organisations unable to justify the expense of meeting room technology refresh and re-investment who “simply want to move their meeting and collaboration platform of chois to Microsoft Teams”.
This new partnership means that partners are now able to better serve the needs of their customers collaboration strategy, budget, deployment schedule and hardware preference. There is no doubt that Cisco has some of the best video conferencing devices and technology in the market today, coupled with their phenomenal global support and maintenance that Cisco partners have leveraged to provide the stability and uptime guarantees that their global customers expect and demand.
Why this is great news for Microsoft
Partnership is two way of course.
Cisco is a world leader in video conferencing and meeting room technology. The majority of their Webex room kit includes a wealth of clever AI powered tech such as speaker tracking, noise cancelling, occupancy sensors, environmental monitoring and integrated digitial signage technology as well being the only vendor that creates truly immersive panoramic meeting experiences such as the Cisco Panorama.
In the past, Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom have all collaborated jointly on developing a native video interop technology which uses Web RTC technology, called Direct Guest Join. This, while useful, is really around bringing better inter company collaboration than actually allowing organisations to run Teams as their preferred meeting technology and is limited in functionality.
Customers seem to be wanted to work with their choice of a communications platform of their choice. With the small (and arguably shrinking market share), Cisco are loosing out on revenue and market share in the hardware space by only supporting their native platform. Partnering with Microsoft seems therefore a sensible move and allows them to retain their quality brand and footprint I the enterprise that has been “forced” to invest in other AV vendors in order to deliver against their collaboration strategy with a Microsoft Teams.
Cisco and Microsoft’s new partnership will enable Microsoft to work. Collaboratively with Cisco (rather than compete) and bring a new class of innovation into Teams Rooms by borrowing some of Cisco’s smarts.
We understand that Cisco are already be working with Microsoft to integrate their DNA spaces services into the newly announced Microsoft Places bringing intelligence and analytics on how meeting spaces are used. This forms a major part of Cisco’s Smart Buildings initiative.
Cisco is giving additional flexibility and choice whilst bringing new innovation to Microsoft Teams.
Cisco
Wait – I have loads of Questions…
That’s ok – the news is still hot of the press. Cisco are running a number of partner and customer webinars and sessions over the next month or so.
We have collated the most common and obvious questions and attempted to answer them here:
1. What does this for the future of Webex?
Webex is a great product and trusted by many FTSE 100 organisations, but the market has shifted and is still shifting rapidly which Cisco clearly recognises.
Whilst we don’t have firm figures for market share from Cisco directly, a 2021 report estimated that Zoom had a 46 percent share (though was very consumer skewed), Microsoft a 54 percent share and Webex market share of meetings was around 7 percent.
That said, Cisco does has a strong install base of Cisco Webex, which they will continue to support and develop. Their devices will now be designed to support both Cisco and Mcirosoft Teams meeting platforms. They are committed to continuing to deliver the best user experience with Webex and will continue to invest in developments that optimise the Webex experience when running on Cisco devices.
Cisco have also said that they will provide Webex Meetings free as a ‘backup to Teams’ for customers using their devices as Mcirosoft MTRs.
2. What Cisco devices will not be supported?
Cisco Room Kit and Room Kit Plus will not be supported on Microsoft Teams since these run on hardware platforms that are currently unable to support Microsoft Teams Rooms. Cisco Desk and Cisco Desk Mini are also currently unable to run as Mcirosoft Teams devices due to hardware platforms that are unable to support native Microsoft Teams Display mode.
As such organisations can of choose from the range of non-Cisco Teams Room Certified devices from other vendors such as Yealink, Poly, Logitech or Neat.
Cisco recommend that their customers with medium sized room look to upgrade / invest in the Cisco Board Pro, which in addition to being an interactive collaboration device works, can also serve as an all-in-one meeting room system when paired with a Cisco Room Navigator.
3. How will this effect Zoom, and Microsoft Video Interop?
This will not change the either the in which third party (incuding Cisco, Pexip or Poly) Cloud Video Interop (CVI) work or the way in which the Web RTC based Direct Guest Join services work between the three VC platforms.
Cisco have said that they will continue to work with Zoom, Google, and Microsoft to enhance these meeting experiences. Both Microsoft and Cisco are also committed to continue to enhance our respective WebRTC based guest join experiences. This announcement means that in addition to the above, their devices can now be configured as Microsoft Teams Rooms devices – meaning they can deliver a native Teams user experience.
4. How do we license the Cisco Devices for Teams Rooms
Microsoft Teams Rooms licenses must be purchased directly from your Microsoft CSP Partner or from Microsoft as part of your Enterprise Agreement . For more information, see the core Teams Room Basic and Teams Room Pro pricing information.
5. Do we still need a Cisco Webex license for the device?
No – but Cisco strongly recommend that organisations buy the Webex Suite to ensure they can leverage the full value of running MTR on a Cisco Device. This is because customers who do not purchase a Webex Suite, will only be able to access Webex meetings via direct guest join, and will not be able to take advantage of the advanced management and workspace analytic capabilities of Control Hub.
6. How will Cisco differentiate their MTRS against the other MTRs?
Cisco’s approach here is that their existing (and new) customers will get to experience the best of breed audio and video intelligence features that have previously only been available to customers using RoomOS and Webex Meetings.
Cisco customers that have bought any part of the Webex Suite will get access to Cisco Control Hub device management and fully featured Webex meetings within Microsoft Teams Rooms.
“Cisco will continue to develop our hardware and software as award-winning, purpose built design, supreme hardware quality and broad device portfolio which makes Cisco Devices the best solution in market for Microsoft Teams.”
Cisco.
Want to know more?
With the digital ink still drying on the announcement, Cisilion are here to help our customers think (or re-think) and plan about how this may impact their meetings space, remote work and collaboration roadmaps.
Speak with Cisilion today to find out more about your interoperability journey from Cisco Webex to Microsoft Teams or how to achieve seemless interoperability between the two platforms.
Cisco are also hosting a customer webinar on November 8th – which can be registered for at https://cs.co/MTR
Collaborative Annotations is another enhancement coming to Teams. Powered by Microsoft Whiteboard, collaborative annotations is designed to further simply the ability to collaborate with others while screen sharing in a Microsoft Teams meetings.
Thus feature brings a new dimension to screen sharing as it allows participants to collaborate on anything by essentially leveraging a whiteboard overlay to anything being shared. This is useful if you want to ask for feedback or input on a design, diagram or any other document in a one2one or when working with a group.
Presenters are able to start collaborative annotation for all participants or just the presenter to annotate on shared screen content.
Using the new feature is simple and intuitive. From within a Teams meeting, there’s a new button located in the meeting controls at the top-center of their screen.
Using Collaborative Annotations
While you’re sharing your full screen in a meeting, select Start annotation Microsoft Teams annotation icon in the meeting controls at the upper-middle area of your screen.
Collaborative Annotations
The red outline around the shared screen will turn blue and all participants will see the Microsoft Whiteboard toolset at the top of the shared screen. Everyone in the meeting can begin annotating right away, and the red pen tool is selected by default.
To begin annotating, you can simply choose one of the tools in the Whiteboard toolset such as Sticky note and start typing or drawing on the screen.
Collaborative Annotations
To use this feature, you must have a presenter role in the meeting.
Annotation settings
By default, everyone can annotate. Collaborative cursors also show the names of every participant in the meeting by default. These settings can be toggled on or off by anyone in the meeting by selection settings and toggling the options as shown below.
Collaborative Annotations settings
Limitations
There are a few limitations though expect these to be fewer as the new feature develops. Most notably these are:
Collaborative Annotation is only available for full-screen sharing, not individual window sharing.
Exporting annotations is not currently supported. Microsoft recommend that you can take screenshots during the meeting
Meeting rooms using Android-based devices are not currently supported.
Availability
This new feature is currently in public preview and is expected to gradually roll out towards the end of this week.
In what could be good news for Business and VC/Collab partners alike, organisations will soon be able to choose between running Cisco Webex or Microsoft Teams natively on their Cisco Meeting devices and cameras starting in 2023.
This was annouced by Cisco and Microsoft at Ignite today (Microsoft’s annual tech conference).
Both Cisco Cisco Room and Cisco Desk Devices, will be certified for Microsoft Teams, a move annouced a few years ago and then back tracked by Cisco but now clearly front and centre.
“Interoperability has always been at the forefront of our hybrid work strategy, understanding that customers want collaboration to happen on their terms — regardless of device or meeting platform. Our partnership with Microsoft brings together two collaboration leaders to completely reimagine the hybrid work experience.”
Jeetu Patel |EVP and GM |Collaboration |Cisco
What might Cisco bring to the Teams Eco System
Cisco becoming a partner in the Certified for Microsoft Teams program for the first time is a big move for Cisco. The Teams Room eco system is already quite crowded with vendors including Yealink, Poly, Logitech, Neat to name a few.
The quality of Cisco kit often dwafs that of the other vendors out there, ever since their aquisition of Tanburg back in 2010.
Under the terms of the partnership, Microsoft Teams will run natively on Cisco Room and Desk devices starting from the first half of 2023, giving users the option of staying within the Teams experience while taking advantage of Cisco’s video and camera technology, complete with noise removal and built-in intelligence.
“Our vision to make Teams the best collaboration experience for physical spaces is brought to life by our incredible ecosystem of hardware partners. By welcoming Cisco as our newest partner building devices Certified for Microsoft Teams, we are excited to bring leading collaboration hardware and software to market together for our joint customers.”
Jeff Teper |President |Collaborative apps and platforms | Microsoft
What devices will be supported?
In the blog, Microsoft and Cisco say that “Initially, six of Cisco’s most popular meeting devices and three peripherals will be certified for Teams, with more to come.
The first wave of devices, expected to be certified by early 2023, will include the Cisco Room Bar, the Cisco Board Pro 55-inch and 75-inch, and the Cisco Room Kit Pro for small, medium and large meeting room spaces, respectively. Cisco Desk Pro and Cisco Room Navigator will follow.
This is great for customers who want to shift eco systems without having to replace their vast array of meeting room technology where this meets the requirements of course to become Teams Native.
Is the end of Webex?
According to Cisco,Absolutely not..
This is all about choice and recognition of the growth and impact of Teams. Cisco customers will have the option to make Microsoft Teams Rooms the default experiences, and the devices will continue to support joining Webex meetings with all the features and functionality customers enjoy today via interop capabilites.
This move also helps customers and partners better meet their sustainability goals and budgets meaning that they can retain the value, quality and brand of Cisco they like in a Teams Native experience without compromise.
What do you think of this news? Share you comments in below.
At the Meta Connect virtual conference yesterday (11th October), Microsoft announced they will make Windows, Office, Teams, and others such as Dynamics available for the new Meta Quest Pro and existing Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headsets under an expanded partnership they announced with Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
Satya Nadella & Mark Zuckerburg at Meta Virtual Connect Conference
“You will be able to play 2D games with your Xbox controller projected on a massive screen on Quest. It’s early days, but we’re excited for what’s to come. Who knows, the next time we talk, maybe we’ll be playing flight simulator together in VR.”
Satya Nadella | CEO | Microsoft
Partnership – not competition
Rather than compete head-to-head within the metaverse space, Microsoft and Meta announced they are partnering to work together on improving the way in which people collaborate, work and game together in virtual reality. The first part of this partnership will see Microsoft bringing its biggest services — Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox Cloud Gaming to Meta’s Quest VR headsets.
Microsoft Teams on Meta’s Quest VR headsets. Image (C) Meta
Microsoft Teams will be available on Meta Quest devices, which will allow people to use Meta’s VR headsets for virtual Teams meetings, as an alternative to Meta’s Horizon Workrooms virtual meeting technology.
People will also be able to join Microsoft Teams meetings from Meta Workrooms.
In the future, people will be able to use Meta avatars in Teams for whiteboarding, brainstorming, and meetups.
Users will be able to interact with features across Microsoft 365 apps including SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook from both Quest Pro and Quest 2.
It will be possible to stream Windows 365, the cloud-version of Windows 11 to Quest Pro and Quest 2 devices.
Microsoft Intune and Azure Active Directory will be available on Quest devices to provide enterprise security, authentication, and device management.
“We are bringing a Microsoft Teams immersive meeting experience to Meta Quest in order to give people new ways to connect…you can connect, share, and collaborate as though you were together in person.”
Satya Nadella | CEO | Microsoft.
Microsoft 365 in VR. Image (c) Microsoft
Is this the end for HoloLens?
Microsoft isn’t giving up on HoloLens for enterprise application, such as remote assist for Oil and Gas, Health, and Military use, but the Meta partnership will allow Microsoft to branch more easily into consumer and commercial applications whilst achieving a much lower entry point using consumer grade technology and services/platform which exist today.
“Meta complements our commitment to HoloLens,” Microsoft’s Teper says in his post.
Release Dates?
Meta will release the Quest Pro on October 25th for $1,499.99. with regards other Meta services in and across Office 365, we will no doubt here more at the various Tech conferences this week. UC Expo, South Coast Summit and of course Microsoft Ignite
Microsoft has just launched Microsoft Teams Pro which is, in their words, “designed to provide an integrated experience and bridge the gap between physical and digital workspaces“. In short, the Teams Room Pro license combines the previous Microsoft Teams Standard and Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium licenses. There is also a new free license, Teams Room Basic – which provides limited Teams Room functionality.
As of Sept 1st, 2022, organisations can no longer purchase new Teams Room Standard or Teams Room Premium licenses – they need to buy Pro or use the “free” basic license.
Teams Room Pro vs Basic – What is the difference?
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Basic license is really designed for small businesses (there’s a limit of twenty-five meeting rooms) and is £0 / FREE. It supports single screen and provides foundational Teams meeting experiences like scheduling and joining meetings as well as wireless content sharing but lacks many of the things that were included in Teams Room Standard. Teams Rooms Basic is included with the purchase of any certified Teams Rooms device at no additional cost, purchased on or after September 1, 2022. Customers can apply up to 25 Basic licenses to their tenant.
For small customers or those that just need basic book and join meetings, this provides a potential cost saving of ~£180 a year per room.
Teams Room Pro
For most organisations (and any that have over twenty-five rooms), Teams Pro is what organisations will want and need. With Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro, users will get to access all the existing Teams Rooms features they have been used to with Teams Room Standard, but they also get new innovations, and the Teams Rooms Managed Service platform. This costs $40 per room per month – about £30 and organisations can use this license (or purchase) with their Teams Room partner to provide a comprehensive Managed Meeting Room experience with the additional value-added service being provided by expert Teams Rooms Partners which includes Cisilion and several others.
Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro provides all the enhanced in-room meeting experiences such as intelligent audio and video, content capture, front row and large galleries, and multi-screen support as well as support for Teams Phone. The Teams Rooms Pro licenses also provides advanced management features like remote device management, auto-updates and patching, conditional access policies, and detailed device analytics, problem diagnosis and vendor hardware updates which is not included on Teams Room Basic. Teams Room Pro also allows IT to connect the Teams Room environment into their IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms like Service Now and Science Logic for example.
Microsoft would like to point customers to their partner pages for any organisation who is seeking additional help managing and supporting their meeting rooms, via partners like Cisilion who have strong technical expertise and deep customer success focus.
License and Feature Comparisons
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Max no. Licenses
25
Unlimited
Cost
Free
$40 (~£30)
Microsoft Teams Licence
✔️
✔️
Audio Conferencing
✔️
✔️
Whiteboard
✔️
✔️
Teams Phone
❌
✔️
Microsoft Intune
❌
✔️
Azure AD Premium P1
❌
✔️
Availability
Worldwide
Worldwide
Procurement
Web Direct or NCE via Partner
Web Direct, NCE (via Partner), EA, EAS, CSP,
Feature Comparison – Meeting Join
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Join meetings with 1-touch, proximity, meeting ID
✔️
✔️
Start ad-hoc meetings from Teams Room
✔️
✔️
Direct Guest Join (Zoom & Webex)
✔️
✔️
Room check-in via Teams Panel
❌
✔️
Join meetings across Teams Cloud
❌
✔️
Feature Comparison – Engagement and Collaboration
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Share and view all Teams content types
✔️
✔️
Front Row
❌
✔️
Together Mode
❌
✔️
Large Gallery Support (up to 50 videos)
❌
✔️
Split Gallery (Dual Screen)
❌
✔️
Feature Comparison – Calling
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Make and receive peer to peer and group calls
✔️
✔️
Microsoft 365 Phone System (PSTN Calling)
❌
✔️
Feature Comparison – Intelligent audio and video
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Support for intelligent speakers with live transcription and speaker identification
❌
✔️
Multi-Camera Support
❌
✔️
Panoramic Room View
❌
✔️
AI noise suppression
❌
✔️
People counting / occupancy
❌
✔️
Feature Comparison – Device Management
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Teams Admin Centre enrollment & inventory
✔️
✔️
Automatic software updates
✔️
✔️
Detailed system and configuration info
❌
✔️
Peripheral health management
❌
✔️
Remote configuration
❌
✔️
Device history and activity
❌
✔️
ITSM integration
❌
✔️
Custom health alerts
❌
✔️
Device and usage analytics
❌
✔️
Feature Comparison – Security & Compliance
Teams Room Basic
Teams Room Pro
Secure Operating System
✔️
✔️
System Level Security
✔️
✔️
Azure AD conditional access policies
❌
✔️
I’ve already got licenses – what does this mean to me?
For most organisations, they will need to make the shift to Teams Room Pro at the end of their license term or reduce the license to Teams Room Basic if they feel they do not need any of the advanced features.
For customers who don’t have an enterprise agreement (usually a 3-year term), and that buy Web Direct (on a credit card) or via a CSP partner, you will no longer be able to buy new Microsoft Teams Rooms Standard or Premium licences; for all new rooms, you will have to use either Teams Room Basic or Pro licences. Once your existing licence term expires for your existing licences, you must make the shift to Teams Pro (or down grade to basic).
Whilst the cost increase will frustrate many users that buy Teams Room Standard today, the price for Teams Room Pro is still very much in line with how much, and the way in which the other providers like Zoom and Cisco also charge for their Room licenses. Microsoft have added a plethora of new features to Teams and Teams Room over the past few years and these price increases are there to support these and future enhancements.
Mix and match – it is also possible, if you wany/need to mix Pro and Basic licenses but bear in mind that the functionality will be different for the different rooms which users will find confusing especially if they use any of the advanced meeting features listed above. might be confusing. More importantly, the management and admin experience will also be different for the Rooms. Remember this is a tenant level limit of 25 Basic Rooms/devices.
Support from Partners: Microsoft would like to point customers to their partner pages for any organisation who is seeking additional help managing and supporting their meeting rooms, via partners like Cisilion who have strong technical expertise and deep customer success focus.
