While the Teams Admin Center (TAC) remains as the main administrative portal for managing Teams as well as Teams Devices including Teams Phones, Teams Panels and Teams Rooms, organizations can now make use of the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management portal to manage Teams Room devices that have the Teams Room Pro license. Note that management service is not available with Teams Room Basic licenses as mentioned in a previous blogpost comparing the Basic vs Pro licenses. Recently, Microsoft added Teams Room on Android (MTRA) devices to this service and so now organizations can manage not only Teams Room on Windows (MTRW) systems but also on Android as well. It's time for a walkthrough of the various management capabilities of the Teams Room Pro Management service and highlight some of the useful features using this portal compared with using the Teams Admin Center.

Large organizations that prioritize security want to migrate to cloud services such as Microsoft 365, but they must ensure that their users can only access approved resources. Companies have traditionally restricted access by restricting domain names or IP addresses. This strategy fails in a world where software as a service (SaaS) apps are hosted in the public cloud and use shared domain names such as outlook.office.com and login.microsoftonline.com. Instead of restricting users to approved identities and resources, blocking these addresses would prevent them from accessing Outlook on the web entirely. Tenant restrictions are a feature in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) that addresses this issue . In this blogpost, we look at how MTR devices can potentially implement this capability.

This blog post aims to help readers understand the new Teams Room licenses that was just released by Microsoft this month and how to work with these licenses in actual Teams Room devices. For more information see the Microsoft Docs article.

Whether planning to deploy Microsoft Teams Room on Windows (MTRoW) solution for a Proof-of-Concept (POC) or an actual deployment, there are certain mandatory pre-requisites that have to be met before the solution can be deployed successfully in a corporate network environment. This includes hardware components of the solution, software licenses, network requirements as well as firewall ports and proxy configurations, and last but not least security and AD/AAD requirements. Below is a handy checklist to make sure all the pre-requisites are met before starting to unbox that brand new MTRoW you just received :)

The latest release of firmware version 7.2.1 allows Poly CCX native Teams phones to have a secondary SIP registration with a standards-based VOIP call server. The Teams account signed in on the phone still remains the primary line for incoming/outgoing calls, while the secondary SIP registration will allow PSTN calls in the event that the Teams connection becomes unavailable. This is useful for disaster recovery scenarios where the corp WAN link is down and the device is no longer able to communicate with Teams. In this case with the secondary SIP registration to a local PBX with PSTN Trunks, users can manually switch to the SIP registered line and continue to make PSTN calls. Note that this is manual failover, not automatic . The blog post describes the steps to enable and deploy this feature. Do note that this feature only works with CCX400/500 with HW Rev K or higher and CCX600.

Proximity Join and Teams Casting are 2 excellent features that are available on Teams Rooms devices. They allow easy joining of a Team Room system into a meeting using a personal iOS or Android smartphone without the need to even touch the control panel of the room device. This is certainly welcome for back to office scenarios in the post-pandemic world of hybrid work. However, not many people are familiar with how to get these 2 features working and in this blog post, we explore 5 tips on how to get Proximity Join and Teams Casting working smoothly.

The adoption of Teams certified devices such as Teams Rooms, Teams phones, headsets, speakers etc continus to grow at a rapid pace and as organizations deploy hundreds of these devices across their network, its vital for IT administrators to be able to manage them from a central location as also be alerted when things go down. Fortunately, the Teams Admin Center provides a way for IT admins to be notified whenever a shared or room devices goes down. This blog post walks through the steps

While native Microsoft Teams phone devices provide the richest and most complete Teams experience, there are still many organizations with existing investments in legacy devices. To help these organizations leverage their existing legacy telephony hardware as they move to Teams Calling, Microsoft has launched the Teams SIP Gateway, a free cloud service that enables core Teams calling functionality on compatible SIP phone models from Cisco, Poly, Yealink and AudioCodes. This blog article describes the pre-requisites and steps on how to provision SIP phones for Teams calling using this new SIP Gateway. For detailed info, refer to the official MS Docs site.

This article describes the process to re-purpose Poly CCX 400/500 from Zoom phones to Teams phones. Poly CCX 400/500 phones are flexible and can be used as generic SIP phones, Zoom phones or native Teams phones. For organizations that are using these phones as Zoom devices and are intending to migrate to Teams phones, there is no need to buy new phones. Simply re-purpose the phones following the the steps in this article

Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) on Windows platform solutions are by far the most deployed Microsoft meeting room solutions today and there are many vendors to choose from such as the Poly MTR on Windows kits. The solution comprises key components such as a Windows PC running Windows 10 with the Teams Room application, a Touchscreen control panel as well as a number of Peripheral devices (camera, microphone, speaker). Many organization have policies that require Windows PCs to join the AD Domain and have Group Policy Objects (GPOs) assigned to improve the security of the device. This blogpost aims to assist administrators on what GPOs may safely be applied to an MTRoW device without losing any functionality and what GPOs will render the device unusable. It is a continuation of the previous blog post.

Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) on Windows platform solutions are by far the most deployed Microsoft meeting room solutions today and there are many vendors to choose from such as the Poly MTR on Windows kits. The solution comprises key components such as a Windows PC running Windows 10 with the Teams Room application, a Touchscreen control panel as well as a number of Peripheral devices (camera, microphone, speaker). Many organization have policies that require Windows PCs to join the AD Domain and have Group Policy Objects (GPOs) assigned to improve the security of the device. This blogpost aims to assist administrators on what GPOs may safely be applied to an MTRoW device without losing any functionality and what GPOs will render the device unusable.