This new subscription includes the Office 365 licenses required to enable cloud voice services on a meeting room device. It is designed specifically for meeting room systems and is a licence for devices only.
It is $15 per device per month and includes the following:
- Microsoft Teams
- Skype for Business Online Plan 2
- Phone System (the right for the device to be a phone, still requires a calling plan or Direct Routing for phone number and service)
- (PSTN) Audio Conferencing (where available)
- Microsoft Intune – for device management)
Note Room resources in Exchange online are free of charge for the Rooms mailbox/calendar.
This is great for those using Skype Room Systems and other meeting room devices as previously you would need to stack a number of user licences which cost more.
You can find it under Subscriptions / Other Plans.
Hey Tom, can you post a link to this license? I can’t seem to find it on microsoft.com or via search engines!
Often things appear on Office 365 before the documentation/marketing catch up. I don’t have any official links yet, but you should find the licence on your Office 365 portal
Awesome i can get back my “User license” and assign to a real person . Cost alot more than $15 to have that license tied into SRS.
Nice work MS
Maybe trying to compete other market forces?
We’ve been using the Common Area Phones SKU to licence SRS devices (under guidance from Microsoft) and we were told that Teams would be added to this SKU by end of Jan.
This new “Meeting Room” SKU is double the price (all of our users have EMS (Intune) licences so we don’t need that on the SRS)
Hi Tom. We’re in the lucky position that as we’re education, we get the majority of our O365 licences FOC. We’ve just invested in a Logitech SRS for one of our conference rooms, and I’ve been able to assign all the licences to make it work from our free pool. We have a small number (5) of Audio Conferencing licences which are chargeable for us, we have used to arrange meetings where we need someone to dial in with a standard telephone.
I redirected one of those Audio Conferencing licences to the SRS user in the hope that whenever anyone created a meeting in the room containing the SRS, the acceptance email would contain the number to dial in on. i.e. all meetings in the SRS room would have audio conferencing (PSTN Dial-in) enabled as i’d allocated the licence in that way. Am I completely mistaken, and the Audio Conferencing licence assigned to the SRS users is a wasted licence?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Martin.
Hi Tom,
Thank you so much for this. I do have a dilemma though. I have a Polycom Trio 8800 and it is assigned the Common Area license. The meet now is enabled on the phone and it does work, however I was thinking with that we will be able to have a full audio conference on it, but does not seem to be the case. I am sure am missing something. Do I need to assign the Meeting Room license to the user, if yes, will that give it an audio conference number with PIN ext for users to dial into?
Hi Dani,
SfB Online or Teams?
What do you mean by “full audio conference”?
thanks
Hi Tom,
MSFT documentation says “You only need to set up Audio Conferencing for people who plan to schedule or lead meetings. Meeting attendees who dial in don’t need any licenses assigned to them” I agree, unless you want to do a 3 way PSTN call (even with a calling plan) then you need a audio conf license.
So for the new Meeting room license, does the audio conf bridge line info assigned to that resource get added to a meeting invite when you include the meeting room as the location? Historically, only invites from meeting organizers with an audio conf license included the bridge line info. Im curious if including the room in the meeting allows audio conf access for all even if organizer does not have Audio Conf license. Thank You for your feedback.
Hi Rick,
The PSTN conf (“Audio conferencing”) in this licence is just to cover scenarios where people do ad-hoc meetings from the room and need dial in.
The person scheduling the meeting will still need PSTN conferencing if they want those details in the invite, even if they add/book a MTR system.
Hope that helps
Hi Tom,
I have multiple CAP license assigned and active in my tenant. We are now moving to a new tenant and I have designated it as Teams only. Will I need CAP licenses or Meeting room licenses? I know CAP was for SFB but will they also work with Teams? Thanks in advance!
Interesting – so If I purchase a meeting license for a device in a room – then the license doesn’t provide an audio conferencing number except in an ad-hoc situation – which is never? So, If I schedule a meeting ahead of time – there’s no phone number? Then there’s barely a reason for the $15 a month. Right? I’d have to get audio conferencing for all of my staff. Might as well do that through Call Tower or something like that. Just trying to understand the benefits of a standalone meeting room license – and I was hoping for that dial in phone number.
phone system: $8
audio conferencing: $4
intune: $2
grand total: $14
why does this cost $15?
Don’t forget the Room license includes “Microsoft Teams” license for using the app. Generally a user using Teams phone system has a Teams license bundled with E3/E5 or similar. In this case the device is standalone and needs the extra license bit to run the app. And technically you get a “Skype for Business Plan 2” because the back end phone system is still Skype. Also, I just discovered you need to add a calling plan as well if you want the device to make and receive phone calls. I thought there were a few hundred calling minutes bundled into the Room license, but apparently not. This brings the total to $27/mo
Good question! We were going to try and move our meeting rooms off user licences onto these until we noticed the price per month is almost the annual cost of the current user licence we are using on the meeting rooms…. Forget that.
[…] Teams, but often Business Premium or Enterprise plans are used. In December 2018 Microsoft introduced a new Meeting Room Office 365 license subscription specifically for devices, so these licenses are […]