Microsoft Teams Rooms will soon be able to join Zoom and Webex Meetings, and Zoom and Cisco Rooms will join Microsoft Teams Meetings

Updated 10th November with more details from Ilya Bukshteyn, Head of Product (Partner Director), Microsoft Teams Devices at Microsoft. I recommend you check out his blog here and follow him on LinkedIn here

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Another big announcement at Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft is updating Microsoft Teams rooms so that they can natively join meetings on Cisco Webex and Zoom. Join will be via WebRTC from the Microsoft Teams Room.

Cisco and Zoom are working to allow their respective room systems to directly join Microsoft Teams meetings.

Microsoft and Cisco have an agreement and Microsoft and Zoom have an agreement. As far as I am aware there is no agreement between Cisco and Zoom to enable joining of each other’s meetings.

Here is an early demo video of a Cisco Webex Room joining a Microsoft Teams Meeting. At the 30 minute mark, this Microsoft Ignite session demos MTR joining a Zoom meeting and a Webex meeting (tough the Webex doesn’t seem to connect).

IIya’s blog sums it up the use case well:

…even if my company has fully standardized on Microsoft Teams meetings, one of our partners or customers may still send us an occasional invite for a WebEx or Zoom meeting, and rather than join that meeting on my laptop or mobile device, I’d like to use all of the rich audio and video capabilities of my Microsoft Teams Rooms to also join that meeting.

 

While the native meetings experience on each of these room systems will always remain richer and more full-featured, we [Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom] all agree that having the ability to easily and simply join the occasional non-native meeting on our room systems is a great thing for our customers. We also expect to expand the list of meeting services and room systems which implement this new web-based approach to non-native meetings as we move further into 2020.

The Microsoft blog says “This capability will be supported on a new generation of meeting room devices with embedded web technology.” Which is all current Microsoft Teams rooms and on the Cisco side their more modern Cisco Webex Rooms. Older Cisco rooms will be able to join Microsoft Teams Meetings via Cisco’s forthcoming CVI service.

The Microsoft Teams Room updates are expected to be generally available in early 2020.

Microsoft also says they plan to support this type of meeting join for other vendors in the future. I wonder who is next?

Stay tuned on the blog for more details as I get them. Subscribe here

Reference:

• Zoom blog on them talking about their room systems joining Microsoft Teams meetings: Zoom Enhances Interoperability with Zoom Rooms Direct Guest Join Capability for Microsoft Teams Meetings
• Cisco Blog: Cisco and Microsoft Have Come Together to Deliver a Better User Experience
• More details on how Cisco is partnering with Microsoft: Cisco Cloud Video Interop (CVI) and Certified SBCs for Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams