What’s New In Microsoft Teams – October 2022

A special Microsoft Teams update for Microsoft Teams Rooms, Teams devices and intelligent cameras from Ignite 2022. This special release includes news about devices for home offices, IntelliFrame, a new Cisco partnership and the latest change to Teams Rooms licensing.

Ignite 2022 – Microsoft Teams Rooms updates

This year at Ignite, Microsoft announced the latest innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Teams devices, and a host of intelligent devices that further improve the ability for everyone to be seen, heard, and fully participate across the hybrid workplace, from anywhere.

Teams devices for home offices and flexible workspaces

Whether you have people already returning to the office every day or only a few days a week, one thing is for certain: everyone wants a seamless meeting experience. Organisations need solutions that fit different levels of budget, tech, and spaces.

Microsoft previously announced hot desking on Microsoft Teams display – a dedicated device for Teams calling and meetings. With hot desking, employees can quickly locate and reserve a desk in advance or right from the device. They can touch down, sign in to their personalised Teams experience, and make calls without any risk of personal information being saved after signing out. This experience is now available on the Crestron Flex Display and later this year, the feature will be available on the Neat Frame and Yealink DeskVision A24.

Present in style and increase audience engagement

Regardless of the place, you’re working from, being able to work seamlessly and present yourself well on video helps foster a more engaging and productive hybrid meeting. It has been announced that the Logi Dock now includes a video mute button. You can now reach out and mute your video with the touch of a button to quickly and easily turn your video on and off.

To further enhance presentations in Teams meetings, the Microsoft Presenter+ handheld accessory enables presenters to easily mute and unmute their voice, advance slides in their presentation, and raise their hand in a meeting – all in a compact, mobile device that can fit in a pocket. Microsoft Presenter+ is now available for pre-order in select markets.

For those that want to share physical content at their desk, whether in an education setting or at work. Later this year, the Logitech Brio 500/505 camera will allow presenters to show themselves and content at the same time to better engage audiences and boost collaboration no matter what space they are in. The new content camera feature is perfect for an array of use cases – to lead live demonstrations, to enable audiences to inspect objects and documents in real-time, or to handwrite or sketch.

Better inclusive experiences for everyone with Teams Rooms

Microsoft’s annual Work Trends Index found that 54% of leaders say their company will invest in tech and space in the coming year to make meeting rooms more hybrid-friendly. This shows that organisations of all sizes are putting greater thought into their traditional workspaces and looking for ways that those spaces can work better for their hybrid workers. Here are a few of the innovations in Teams Rooms – from physical spaces to the remote worker experience – that help meet those needs.

Empower your team with inclusive features

Hybrid meetings are now the norm for many organisations, there’s a greater need for technology to enable in-person and remote workers to collaborate more efficiently and interact more equitably, with everyone on a level playing field.

When Microsoft first introduced Front Row, their vision was a layout that supports more inclusive and more engaging hybrid meetings, helping in-room participants and remote participants to feel like they’re meeting in the same room. With the optimisations they announced this year at Ignite for Teams Rooms on Windows, the experience can now elevate even more hybrid meetings with greater flexibility to support a broader set of rooms.

When your hybrid meeting is more about content, the video gallery view now has an improved chat layout to make it easy to follow chat conversations and see everyone in the meeting, all in one view.

The first generation of Front Row – with meeting content, the front row video gallery, and the chat in one view — enhanced the hybrid meeting experience for many Teams Rooms, but it can be a lot to fit on a smaller front-of-room display.

To optimise the Front Row experience for more Teams Rooms, Microsoft has now optimised the video layout on 16:9 aspect ratio displays. By decreasing the default height of the gallery and removing the left panel (which previously displayed participants who raised their hands), Microsoft has improved the compatibility of the video layout. A 16:9 display ensures that in-room participants don’t lose visibility for faces in the video gallery or in the chat.

For rooms with wider and dual screens, Microsoft has updated the gallery size and adjusted the header to maximise content for improved readability. Front Row will make these adjustments dynamically, depending on the size of your screen.

Everyone has a place in the video gallery with IntelliFrame

The current standard for video meetings is a single, broad video of in-room attendees. This view makes it difficult for remote attendees to clearly see faces and track who is speaking. Microsoft has announced that IntelliFrame will break that standard apart.

IntelliFrame enhances the focus and framing of in-room meeting attendees so that all meeting participants – including those in the room – have their own, individual frame in the video gallery. Remote participants will be able to see in-room participants’ faces better, making it easier to track who’s talking and read facial expressions, and helping them to feel more like they’re face-to-face.

Based on the camera you’re using for your Teams Room, there are three ways IntelliFrame works in action. For Teams Rooms outfitted with an intelligent camera capable of producing multiple video streams, IntelliFrame delivers an enhanced video gallery experience.

To help remote participants feel even closer to the people in the room, and make in-room participants feel more included, intelligent cameras also support AI active speaker tracking and, in the coming months, will include people recognition.

People recognition recognises, labels, and adds in-room participants to the meeting participant list after enrolling biometrics into the secure Microsoft cloud.

One of these cameras that will work in sync with Intelliframe is the Yealink SmartVision 60 intelligent camera, available in early 2023, it is the first centre-of-room, 360 panoramic degree camera designed for Teams Rooms. Microsoft engineers, in partnership with Yealink, Intel, NVIDIA, and Ricoh, designed and built one of the most powerful AI cameras in the industry from the ground up, including the AI director, the form factor, the firmware, and the software, using the Microsoft Intelligent Camera Hardware and Software reference design kit.

Yealink SmartVision 60 also includes all the great features of Microsoft Teams intelligent speakers, including people identification in live transcription and Cortana digital assistant.

If Teams Rooms is outfitted with a camera capable of running advanced OEM AI features, remote attendees see an IntelliFrame view of the room’s participants. Poly, Logitech, Jabra, and Neat are partners that have the technology available this year.

For Teams Rooms equipped with all other existing camera types, IntelliFrame will deliver an enhanced video gallery experience by leveraging the latest Microsoft-built AI models running in the Microsoft cloud, which will process the video stream from the room. This experience will be available in early 2023.

However, in all set-ups, in-room participants have control over how they are represented in a meeting – the IntelliFrame option is the default but can be changed in the camera control menu on the in-room console. IT admins will have control of the IntelliFrame option as the default for in-room cameras via the Teams admin centre.

Meeting spaces fit for Teams Rooms

Meeting spaces have to change to accommodate the needs of hybrid workers to ensure everyone can collaborate, brainstorm and share ideas. With advancements in intelligent devices, Microsoft has re-evaluated what a Signature Microsoft Teams Room experience should be.

Optimising Conference rooms for better engagement and collaboration

With Signature Teams Rooms, Microsoft has reimagined the furniture, hardware, tech, and room configuration to create an environment where both in-room and remote participants feel more engaged, and interactions feel more inclusive and natural. They’ve reoriented the room configuration from the centre of the room towards the display and camera, so everyone benefits from face-to-face interaction.

In a medium-sized space, people in the room sit at a curved table facing the front-of-room display. With Front Row, remote and in-person participants face each other on a horizontal plane just like they would if they were physically sitting across from each other in the room.

Cameras are mounted at eye level, enabling more natural eye gaze from in-room participants.

In addition, AI noise suppression removes background noise, reducing distractions for remote attendees. And spatial audio (available soon) in the room will enable in-room participants to hear remote participants more clearly and naturally.

For smaller rooms, a half-circle-shaped table helps to achieve that same degree of face-to-face engagement.

To help simplify deployment, Microsoft has already introduced new A/V standards with a unified design to make it easy to add Signature Teams Rooms to your environment and transform how hybrid teams can connect across your spaces.

Cisco partnership

In the coming months, Cisco will become a Certified for Microsoft Teams Devices partner, expanding the portfolio of certified devices available to deploy in Teams Rooms. Devices will initially include 6 meeting devices and 3 peripherals, with many more to come. The expected devices to become Teams Rooms-certified in early 2023 are Cisco Board Pro 55-inch, 75-inch, Cisco Room Bar and Cisco Room Kit Pro.

The first peripheral – the Cisco Desk Camera 4K – is an intelligent USB webcam and will be available by the end of October.

Other devices and peripherals will follow. Two headsets – the Headset 320 and Headset 720 – will be available early next year. Later, we expect to see the Cisco Desk Pro as a Teams Display and the Cisco Room Navigator wall panel as a Teams Panel.

Cisco devices will run the Microsoft Teams Android client natively on their room systems. The default user experience on these devices will be Microsoft Teams Rooms, but the devices will also have native support for joining meetings hosted on Webex. Soon users will be able to join Webex Meetings either from a calendar via a one-touch join button, or via a Join by Code experience, and both will launch a native Webex application. The device will always return to Team Rooms once the Webex meeting has ended.

Teams Rooms Pro

Microsoft is now offering a single, comprehensive solution that delivers everything you need to have productive hybrid meetings and manage your room operations intelligently at scale. Teams Rooms Pro delivers all the experiences you know and love in Basic, plus enhanced in-room meeting experiences, security and advanced management, as well as the latest innovations in hybrid optimisation to simplify your businesses’ hybrid readiness journey.

The all-in-one licence will have advanced management, including automatic updates, advanced configuration recommendations, and advanced AI analytics, plus inclusive meeting layouts and so much more.

With Teams Rooms Pro, you no longer need to worry if your rooms are future-proof. You’ll get access to the latest and greatest features as soon as they’re released, for even better hybrid meetings.

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Find out more from the Microsoft Teams official blog post here