A momentous June for Microsoft Teams featured a variety of news, from introducing spatial audio for immersive meetings to revelations about which licenses will grant access to Microsoft’s AI-powered productivity tool, Copilot.
There have also been significant updates for Teams Rooms for both its Android and Windows products, not limited to Microsoft delaying the end of personal terms Teams Rooms hardware licenses.
Graham Walsh, Microsoft MVP & Product Specialist at Neat, told UC Today about what new features Teams Rooms on Android has received or will soon receive — and whether it means the level of flexibility and innovation brings it closer than ever towards equity with its Windows counterpart.
Walsh explained that “Update Two” for this calendar year is rolling out at different times for different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), as some updates are only available through the Teams Admin Centre, where some OEMs bundle it. Some customers will have to wait for their firmware to be delivered with it.
“But one of probably the biggest things for government customers in the US is GCC high support,” Walsh said, “so they’ve been able to take these Android devices and register into their Teams app and sensor and get them online.” Although, Walsh added that, for the moment, that only applies to one (currently unknown) OEM.
A more general feature for Android for Teams Rooms is the capability for additional USB cameras on the device.
“Android device powers have always been an all-in-one device,” Walsh explained. “Logitech has this roommate, this appliance, where you can potentially plug in additional cameras. So this is where Update Two will allow that additional camera to be plugged in. But I’m also also guessing some of the room bars, they will all have USB ports. Potentially, they could have an additional camera, maybe at the back of the room looking at a presenter, in there as well.”
Alongside the additional camera, Android can now support an alternative option of a content camera or magic whiteboard, which was planned when the solution was initially launched. “The content capture,” Walsh added, “so if you’ve got a traditional analogue whiteboard and want to digitize that into a meeting, Android now supports this. This has been on Windows for quite a while, and now you can have this content camera on Android.”
There are five or six certified vendors for content cameras, but at the moment, the exact list of which Android vendors are supporting this content camera option is unknown.
The current ambiguity doesn’t particularly help customers who want to feel excited about their product updates, as Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud, affirmed to UC Today, “It’s tricky when you’ve got so many OEMs and so many options and not everybody supporting everything”.
Several other usability features were introduced for Rooms for Android, including the option for defaulting a user’s layout.
“When you walk into a room, you can default it to content and people,” Walsh described the feature. “So we see everyone on the screen, and we see content. This is especially for people who had or have single screens. We see a lot of meetings based on single-screen devices now or even a larger format display. Previously, if you had some content sharing, were you ready to start your meeting, you wouldn’t know who was on video.”
The feature won’t be available to change through the Teams App and Centre. Instead, users have to decide what layout they want to fix the device in the configuration profile. Users could set it to the front row or just content and gallery.
Another new feature is something that many OEMs had already worked on when they built their own menu or swipe menu to control the camera and the framing.
“It’s now in the default UI of Microsoft,” Walsh said, “and this is their attempt to bring together multiple different OEMs with naming conventions such as Neat Symmetry, Logitech RightSight, Poly AI Director. All these different manufacturers have their own naming conventions.”
“This is the attempt to bring it together in the Microsoft app,” Walsh expanded. “So if you do have a mixed estate, I know your rooms in the US might be one OEM, and in Europe, they might be another. This means it’s simplified for the user that when they hit the icon next to the camera now, the down arrow, they get to choose room view, composite view or active speaker.”
Depending on the hardware and its distinct capabilities, users will see two options, or if they have more advanced cameras, then potentially three possibilities with the active speaker function.
How close do these updates bring Android to Windows in Teams Rooms functionality?
“There are lots of options for bringing it up to future parity with Windows,” Walsh said. “There’s still an us and them, I think, in the product group. And there are slightly different features in one and not the other. But for the majority of meeting spaces, again, I think the simplified Android bars tick a lot of people’s boxes.”
Arbuthnot pointed out that parity between the two products is a “constantly moving target”.
“Android gets a lot of features, and then Windows potentially gets new features,” Arbuthnot said. “I think what’s happening is Android is getting a lot of the fundamentals, ticking all the boxes that your typical user would want most of the time, and certainly in those smaller and medium spaces, and maybe even some large spaces. But you’ll see Windows now have the smart speaker, the face recognition, the Copilot stuff.”
“There’ll always be a difference,” Arbuthnot maintained, “and customers will always have to decide what they want to do price and standards-wise. But I’m seeing most customers mix. Android for typical rooms and Windows for more complex structured audio, multi-camera when it comes to multi-stream, that kind of thing. So we’ll see how customers react, but it is good for customers that Android is closing the gaps in features for sure.”
While Android might be closing the gap on Windows’ capabilities, Windows itself has enjoyed several vital updates recently, including its development into version 4.17.
“So we get the new user interface refresh applied by default,” Arbuthnot detailed, “and Microsoft has improved how the custom backgrounds and custom home screens work, which was the block of making that default. SIP/323 outbound dialling with CVI — the first vendor who can do that there is Pexip.”
“So that’s the first time we can natively dial from an MTR room to a standards-based SIP endpoint like a direct peer-to-peer,” Arbuthnot continued. “Some Together Mode improvements, some meeting surveys at the end of the meeting. For Pro customers, the Pro agent is rolled into the device now. So the device registration for the Pro portal is a little bit slicker.”
UC Today‘s full interview with Arbuthnot and Walsh on Teams Rooms, Windows Copilot licenses and more will be published on UC Today‘s website and YouTube channel soon.
from UC Today https://ift.tt/IdjQnpx
0 Comments