Ignite 2019 - BRK3261 - Learn about new, innovative and intelligent devices for Microsoft Teams

Presented by: Sandhya Rao (personal devices) and Greg Baribault (shared room devices)

Session summary:

Learn what’s new with Microsoft Teams Devices that will bring the modern workplace experiences to life across all spaces and conference rooms in your organization.

My Notes:

There is a certified devices program where devices are tested to work well with Teams, please use these devices.

New Teams-certified Speaker phones with a "Teams button" which indicates missed calls, and quick meeting join.

• Poly - Calisto 3200
• Jabra - Speak 750
• Sennheiser - Expand SP 30T
• Yealink - CP700 / CP900

Last year there were 20 million desk phones sold globally, and this number is growing.

Hotdesking is a new feature to be used with the Teams desk phones. The phone is logged in, but a user can come and login on the phone with his credentials, use it for a while, and at logoff the phone will revert to the original number. It will be possible to dial 911 straight from the lock screen (how about 112?)

New Collaboration Bars hardware are coming from Poly and Yealink in early 2020. The Collaboration Bar will contain a camera, speaker and compute so no additional computer needed to run a meeting.

Console / compute systems are available from Crestron, HP, Lenovo which have the audio built in the console, and Logitech, Yealink which have the compute section separate, so it could be hidden under the table for example. Crestron and Logitech also have content cameras (white board cameras) available.

With Proximity based meetings you simply walk into the room with a meeting running on your device - mobile phone or tablet or PC - and the room will be added to the meeting automatically and your device will be muted and silent to avoid howling.

Whiteboard and Content capture camera, makes it easier to whiteboard and include remote users. The front of room displays can be configured with custom images and branding on the console itself will soon be available.

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 Webex meeting with video was shown. Cisco and Zoom devices will be able to join Teams meetings as well.

Management of MTRs is coming to the Teams Admin portal showing the usage and health of the rooms.

A "Managed meeting rooms" service will be offered from Microsoft for $50 per month per room, see the "Managed Meeting Rooms Service Overview" session for more information.

A closer integration between Surface Hub and Teams Rooms is being worked on. These two devices will be aware of each other and cooperate when they are in the same room. They will also join the meeting together by inviting each other.

QnA

Is the MTR a separate license?

Yes, it has a separate license (Meetingroom SKU) which is like an E5 without the office apps and is about $15 per room per month.

Will the 3rd party join work if the device is in SfB only mode?

Maybe (should not be any technical blockers.)

Ignite 2019 - BRK2373 - Managed Meeting Rooms Service Overview

Presented by: David Howell and Irena Andonova

Session summary:
Managed Rooms is a cloud-based IT management and security monitoring service that keeps Microsoft Teams Rooms devices and their peripherals, secured, up to date and proactively monitored, maintaining an environment optimized for a great user experience. In this session you will learn about how this service can help you scale and manage your meeting room deployment either on your own or with the help of partners.

My Notes:

Managed Meeting Rooms - Microsoft is the operator for your rooms. The number of rooms are rapidly increasing, still many customers will only have a small number of rooms. The rooms should be kept secured and managed at all times. There will be a cost related to this service, a cost is already present due to updating of the firmware, security updates, troubleshooting, monitoring.

Managed Meeting Rooms applies Microsoft expertise, machine learning, global footprint, scale elasticity, operational insights, cross customer learning, and a trusted partner network to free IT professionals from the demands of meeting room management, allowing them to focus on their core business. This is being orchestrated from Microsoft’s operations center. At the moment Microsoft is managing more than 1700 rooms for more than 130 customers.

https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/across-devices/spaces

is a page where Microsoft have collected all know-how around Teams rooms which will help customers select appropriate devices for different types of rooms.

The customer dashboard of Managed Teams Rooms

A demo was showed with examples of how some faults are reported

• A camera was disconnected
• An IT department applied MFA to all room accounts
• The device got the wrong time zone applied
• BIOS not up to date

The portal also contains Usage reports showing how often is the room booked, and how many attendees are online.

Foot locker came on stage to tell about their experience with Managed Meeting Rooms. One of their rooms in Milwaukee went from being the least used room to the most used room just by placing an MTR in the room. They noticed that local IT would take a tour every morning just to check all the rooms if cables were connected, was the hardware online?

With Managed Meeting Rooms the customers get expert management, proactive security, enhanced insights and trusted partners to keep to rooms running great.

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.

Ignite 2019 - THR2049 - How to drive successful Microsoft Teams adoption in five steps

Presented by: Adam Deltinger from Stratiteq Sweden AB

Session summary:
Learn how to get better user adoption for Microsoft Teams within your organization in five easy to understand steps! This theater session is intended for IT managers as well as any stakeholder or user champion. Gain a better understanding of how you can perform a successful rollout of Microsoft Teams in your organization.

My Notes:

A session about end user adoption. Introducing a new application without explaining what's in it for the users is not a good idea and can even cause "Shadow IT" apps to be used instead.

Five (+1) steps in 20 minutes? Adoption is not easy, in reality it will take much more time.

1. Collect important information - find adoption stakeholders and set up workshops, make a plan
2. Conduct a Pilot - try quick wins, get feedback and adjust, collect common questions
3. Communication - inform users before, during and after a deployment, use material from Microsoft
4. Champions Program - let your champions join the Microsoft Champions Program, follow up with them.
5. Individual workshops - go Team by Team help them get started
6. Measure usage - Teams usage reports

Ignite 2019 - BRK1069 - Empower your Firstline workforce with Microsoft Teams

Presented by: Keara James and Scott Morrison

Session summary:
From streamlining shift management to customizing the Teams experience, Microsoft Teams can help your Firstline Workers be more productive. Find out what's new in Teams for your Firstline workforce.

My Notes:

Firstline workers should be connected and empowered.

Microsoft Teams - the (mobile) hub for teamwork

Off-shift access is a new setting that can be enabled by administrators to provide a notification to Firstline Workers when they access the Teams app on their personal device outside of their payable hours.

Delegated User Management allows Firstline managers to manage user credentials (phone number) via the My Staff portal.

SMS Sign-in will allow a Firstline Worker to sign-in with only the phone number and a one-time passcode received via SMS.

Global sign-out will sign out from Teams and any other LOB application the Firstline Worker might be signed in to.

A long good demo using only a mobile phone was shown illustrating many functions in Teams and how to customize the experience for the Firstline Workers. Pinning apps, voice messages, content camera, read receipts, urgent messages and were all in the demo from the cell phone. Shifts can be updated via Graph API from workforce management software such as Chronos, JDE or similar. Next, the shifts managers (store managers / department mangers) view were demoed.

There are 8 sessions on Firstline Workers at Ignite 2019.

The presentation ended with a video showing how Alcoa is using the Firstline Workers features in Teams.

QnA

When is recurring Shifts coming?
It is being worked on, meanwhile the copy shifts function can be used.

How about recurring Tasks?
Flow can be used for this, building into the platform is on the roadmap.

How can Regional managers view tasks?
It is on the roadmap.

What are user tags?
Several users can get the same tag by an administrator and can be @-mentioned, or a chat can be started with all users sharing the same tag.
 

Links to more resources - FLW style :-)

Ignite 2019 - THR2069 - Microsoft Teams: Real-world tips for success

Presented by: Tom Arbuthnot from Modality Systems

Session summary:
Based on real-world experience, these tips ensure your success with Microsoft Teams. From business transformation to technical tips, come to this session to learn the top considerations when deploying Microsoft Teams.

My Notes:

Plan your journey in multiple phases. "Collaboration" is good but might not unlock the budget needed to run a Teams project, find other business drivers.

Understand the (Coexistence) modes that can be set on a user basis.

• Islands mode - is both good and bad in the way that you get all functionality, but have SfB side-by-side (which application should we use for feature x?) Islands mode should not be seen as a permanent stage, have a plan on how to get to Teams Only before you send users to the Island.
• Collaboration mode - get the "Teams" functionality out of Microsoft Teams.
• Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration and meetings - good for letting the users get the benefit of Teams meetings using improved codecs and cloud recording.
• Meetings First - only meetings but not the collaboration part, scheduling from Outlook will give Teams meetings and the Meeting Migration Service will convert all SfB meetings to Teams meetings.
• Teams Only - This is where you want to be. Required for telephony functions. It is still possible to join SfB meetings with the "minimized"/stripped SfB client.

Set business goals for your Teams implementation, get an executive sponsor.
Support the cultural change that comes with Teams - sell the benefits.
Governance - important, not exciting. Consider lifecycle management, guest access and document the approach.
Measure success - use the Office 365 reporting and gather feedback.

A Teams project will never be "done". Microsoft Teams will keep evolving adding new features, the organization will evolve and change business processes, new users will be added. Assign a service owner to handle this.

Ignite 2019 - BRK2249 - Advanced Reporting and Diagnostics using Call Quality Dashboard (CQD)

Presented by: Siunie Sutjahjo and Satish Kumar from Accenture

Session summary:

Join us to learn how Accenture have been able to benefit from our latest Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) and supporting capabilities to save time and effort. We demonstrate the latest Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) capabilities and how these help with troubleshooting call quality. We are bringing new analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to assist you in making decisions proactively in near real time.

My Notes:

Before the session Siunie posted an informative article about the new name and general availability for CQD version 3 on the Tech communities, read it here: Introducing the Advanced Call QualityDashboard

What's in Advanced CQD?

Near Real-Time data (on average 30 minutes)

Additional data and dimensions

Integration with Power BI (call quality on maps)

Data from Microsoft Teams or SfB 2019 on-premises

Current and coming features in CQD

 

Accenture runs 216K Teams over 450K devices handling some 350,000,000 audio minutes and 125,000,000 chat messages every month and believes CQD has lot of potential to monitor their call quality. Accenture reviews the dashboard daily and use it as the start for any actions, even "Rate my call" information is reviewed daily to find trends. They also built their own customized reports in Power BI and then surfaced these in Teams - nice! Accenture especially pointed out the possibilities to "drill in" in the data as helpful, when they see a trend they will start to look in one of the four regions they established then go to the location (country) next look at the subnet level, hourly trend and all the way down to a specific user. Also, the possibilities to filter the data is useful like excluding WiFi data and VPN traffic from certain reports.

What are the actions Accenture takes when they see drops in call quality?

They will engage with the local networking Team to find out - is there overutilization at this site, packet loss, changes being made, network hardware running at high CPU, is TCP being used instead of UDP?

 

Enhanced Summary reports

A recorded demo of how to build reports in Power BI using a "CQD Connector" which is coming in preview soon was shown. In the future Machine Learning will be used to analyse the data and find issues.

QnA

Will SfB 2015 on-premises be supported with Advanced CQD?

No, the database schema has changed between SfB 2015 and 2019 and only 2019 is supported.

How do we handle wireless networks with IP roaming?

It was harder to do with CQD v2, but in Advanced CQD Basic Service Set identifier (BSSID) is part of the data collected.

How are Push notifications done?

This is still being worked on, it is in the roadmap but not in preview yet.

Will there be new detailed report templates available?

Not from Microsoft. However, reports created in CQD v2 can be exported and imported to CQD v3.

Will all the data in CQD be available through Power BI?

Yes, if you belong to the right RBAC group for access. Also, due to compliance reasons, personal data is only kept for 30 days.

Are there any special reports available for Direct Routing in CQD?

No, not currently, but it is coming soon.