Ignite 2019 - MTG30 - Microsoft Teams Rooms deployment for an inclusive and enhanced meeting room

Presented by: Christian Schacht, Greg Baribault and James Corso from Foot Locker

Session summary:
Learn about the different options for meeting spaces, what to consider during planning, deployment, best practices, and new tools for managing your Teams meeting rooms at scale.

My Notes:

New Collaboration Bars hardware are coming from Poly and Yealink in early 2020.

Foot locker came on stage to tell about their experience with MTR. Foot locker have 40,000 employees in 27 countries. Before MTR they used audio conferencing, with MTR they like the one touch experience to join meetings. Effortless content share, ease of use and the flexibility of the meeting rooms hardware is also appreciated. Foot locker have a plan to stop using earlier persistent chat systems and Skype in favour of Teams. They see the Surface hub as a compliment to MTR, not a replacement. They even had a user calling the helpdesk thanking them for implementing Teams - not bad!

Microsoft Teams Rooms are

• Easy: Start meetings in seconds
• Inclusive: Everyone gets a seat a the "table"
• Scalable: Configurations for any space
• Ready: Deploy and Manage at scale

MTR consoles are available from Crestron, HP, Lenovo, Logitech, Yealink. Full Catalogue available at https://aka.ms/TeamsDevices All features of MTR are available on all the different hardware options.

A lot has happened since Skype Room Systems became Teams Rooms.

The content capture camera will be supported even on Surface Pro soon.
Branding on the console is coming back again.
Control extensions can enable the console to do room automation such as lights or blinds.

Direct guest join for third party meetings will allow a MTR to connect to Zoom and/or Webex meetings using WebRTC. A demo of joining a Zoom meeting and a Webex meeting was shown.

Management of MTRs is coming to the Teams Admin portal showing the usage and health of the rooms. In this portal functions such as reboot, changing settings such as password and account information will be available, all peripherals with firmware versions will be shown here. There will also be a one-click access from the device to the new Endpoint manager (formerly known as Intune) so that Windows settings can be managed as well. The same way there will be a link from the Endpoint manager portal into the MTR portal. A changelog will be in the portal as well.

There will also be a "Managed meeting rooms" service in addition to the new portal where Microsoft can monitor the room, fix what is possible remote or notify local help if needed.