Using Microsoft Teams Room for Webex Meetings

In the July update for Microsoft Teams Room version 4.5.35.0, a new feature known as Direct Guest Join was released that allows MTR devices to join Cisco Webex meetings directly without any gateway or cloud interop service. This feature expands the capabilities of Teams Room Devices and allows interoperability with Cisco Webex meetings with one-click join functionality. In this blog post we explore the required steps to enable Direct Guest Join on MTR and the overall meeting experience and current limitations. In the future, we can expect MTR to support additional meeting ecosystems in the same way as well. Direct Guest Join leverages WebRTC technologies to allow MTR to join meetings hosted in CIsco Webex and other future meeting platforms.

In order to enable the Direct Guest Join feature on MTR we need to make sure the MTR us running the latest version which at the time of this writing is actually 4.5.37.0. As mentioned in a previous article, there are several ways to update the version and the easiest is via the Microsoft Store. Simply login as administrator on the MTR system and launch the Microsoft Store app and check for updates. Any newer version of the Teams app, a.k.a. "Skype Room System" will be displayed allowing you to start an update after which you should reboot the system. The picture below shows the recently updated apps which includes the 4.5.37 version of the Teams Room app:

Once the system is rebooted and logged in as the regular room account, we can go to the settings page and navigate to the About section to verify the MTR version as shown below:

Next we navigate to the "Meetings" section and under the "Third party meetings" section, we note that Cisco Webex is available for us to switch on as shown below:

As a side discussion, there's also a page called "Coordinated meetings" which allows the MTR system to work well with other room devices such as the Microsoft Surface Hub 2, so that when users start a meeting on the MTR, it will also give the opportunity to add a nearby Surface Hub2 device for collaboration. We can turn this feature on and select whether this device's microphone, camera and whiteboarding are turned off or on during the coordinated join as shown in the diagram below:

Before we can get the MTR system to recognize and display Webex meeting invitations that are sent to it, we have to configure the Exchange tenant as mentioned in the Microsoft documentation. This is simply an Exchange online powershell cmdlet:

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity polymtr01 -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $true

Which will enable the MTR's Exchange mailbox account to process external meeting messages and display a Join button on the home screen as shown below:

Now we're ready to the Webex meeting from the MTR. Simply hit the "Join" button and the MTR will connect to Cisco Webex to join the meeting. The MTR controller will show that the system is in the Webex Meeting along with the meeting subject. Meeting controls such as volume control, mute/unmuate, camera on/off and Leave are all available. However, its notable that content sharing from MTR is not available at this time. Other than that, the audio quality and video resolution seen on both the MTR and the Webex client are great:

We can also initiate content sharing from the Webex client in which case the content will be displayed in the main area and videos of participants will be moved to to the right and resized to be smaller as shown below:

Finally, an interesting capability that can be used during the meeting is to turn on the button on the botton left of the MTR controller labled as 'Show meeting on this device". This will mirror the MTR's main display onto the MTR's touch controller as shown below:

One example of using this feature is that it allows the content to be displayed closer to for participants that may be further away from the main display. in conclusion, Microsoft keeps adding new capabilities to the MTR system and we have now the ability to join Cisco Webex meetings directly from the MTR without any interop service. One may expect that there will be other meeting platforms that will be added in the future as well. Until then, enjoy the MTR and rest easy in the fact the MTR is a safe investment that will serve your meeting rooms well into the foreseeable future.