Microsoft Teams, 7 New Things from Enterprise Connect

On its first year birthday, Microsoft Teams won best in show at Enterprise Connect, congrats to everyone at Microsoft. I didn’t get over to Enterprise Connect, but thanks to a number of Colleagues and friends (thanks!). I’ve been keeping up with all the news remotely.

You can also watch back the Microsoft Keynote here: http://teamsatenterpriseconnect.azurewebsites.net/

Over the week features/announcements were made, I’ll be digging into some of these in more detail in future blog posts, be sure to subscribe if you want to join my weekly email update and be notified when they are posted.

Here are the 7 major announcements:

Teams IP Phones and Conference Room Phones

Specific Teams  IP Phones running an Android Teams app. For more details see my blog post on Phones: http://tomtalks.blog/2018/03/microsoft-teams-ip-desk-phones-and-room-phones/

Thanks, Henry Creagh for the photos.

 

 

“Mobile Phone Stations” – Plantronics

A new type of device, a mobile dock that provides a speakerphone, dial pad and headset. the first device to be shown was from Plantronics. You know I’ll be chasing them for a review unit for the blog, stay tuned.

• Wireless charging
• Auto transfer teams meeting to speakerphone or headset
• Teams button to directly launch the Teams mobile app

Cortana voice interactions for Teams Phones and Room Systems

Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.

Creating a conference call just by lifting the receiver and saying the people you want to call:

Adding a person to a Skype Room Systems meeting with Cortana

 

Proximity detection for Skype/Teams Meeting Room Systems

If you go into a room with your laptop and a Teams enabled meeting room system, your laptop client will automatically know you are in a room with a Teams meeting room device and offer to add it to the meeting

Mobile Companion Experience and Mobile sharing in meetings

Not demonstrated in the keynote. Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device. Join on the desktop and join on mobile and use mobile to:

• Control PowerPoint
• Use the mobile camera to add that video feed into the meeting
• Share the screen of the mobile, i.e. show mobile apps and stream them into the meeting, much like an iOS screen recording, but live

Background blur on video

The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.

 

Inline message translation in channels and chat

 

Smaller announcements/updates:

Not new but demo/mentioned again

• More specific detailed on Direct Routing (bring your own SBC/SIP Trunk) for Microsoft Teams: http://tomtalks.blog/2018/03/more-details-on-microsoft-teams-direct-routing-connect-your-own-sbc-for-pstn-including-direct-carrier-support/
• Cloud Recording and Transcription with jumping to keywords
• Skype Broadcast integration coming to Teams
• Who bot finding expertise
• All skype room systems will get a native teams experience (in a few months)
• Polycom, Pexip and Bluejeans all demo’d live standards-based video interop to Teams
• Surface hub joining teams meetings natively coming soon
• Pre Meeting join experience
• Consult transfer
• Logitech Meetup new feature: Auto person detection and framing/zoom

Did I miss anything? Please let me know.

Pre-meeting join experience:

Cloud Recording

Recording Playback with Transcription and Search

Search Transcript

Delegate Experience (incoming call toast):

Consult Transfer:

Random Trivia, you see in Marc’s demo the canary (early) version of the mobile app and Ring 0 of the desktop app

Reference customers:

200,000 organisations using Microsoft Teams

Three Modality Customers on that list I’m proud to say.