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Introducing Direct Guest Join for expanded capabilities in Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android

Matt-Taylor's avatar
Matt-Taylor
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 06, 2022

Within hybrid work, organizations have been forced to adapt and reimagine how people will communicate and collaborate. Even with Microsoft Teams providing innovative solutions to hybrid work challenges, employees can often work with organizations outside of their own and occasionally need to join meetings from third-party meeting providers.


Today, Teams Rooms on Android offers Direct Guest Join, a one-touch experience that allows users to join a third-party online meeting from their Teams Rooms just as easily as they can join meetings hosted in Teams. This experience helps reduce friction when users are joining calls from external partners or clients who may not use the same meeting provider.

 

Teams Rooms on Android will initially offer interoperability with Zoom meetings, while Cisco Webex and other third-party partners are coming soon to the Android platform. This experience began to rollout on May 25 for Poly Teams certified devices, with Logitech and Yealink fast following, and additional device manufactures coming soon.


Under the hood
Microsoft partnered with Zoom, Cisco, GoToMeeting, and BlueJeans to create an interoperability experience with Direct Guest Join. Third-party providers like Zoom provide an embedded web experience that temporarily allows Teams Rooms users to join third-party meetings and collaborate more freely. This web experience provides up-to-date software as well as enterprise-grade privacy and security. As this partnership grows, Direct Guest Join will continue to improve with new and exciting functionalities.

 

To learn more about the future of Rooms and its interoperability experience, be sure to watch this joint webcast between Microsoft and Zoom, with Ilya Bukshteyn, VP of Teams Calling and Devices, and Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms and Whiteboard.

 

Additional Resources:

Updated Aug 04, 2022
Version 2.0
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58 Comments

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  • Harald_Steindl's avatar
    Harald_Steindl
    Iron Contributor
    Jul 05, 2022

    MarkL 
    How about the following:

    New-TransportRule -Name "Meeting Room External Booking" `
-SentToMemberOf "email address removed for privacy reasons" `
-ExceptIfSenderDomainIs zoom.us,zoom.com,webex.com `
-FromScope NotInOrganization `
-DeleteMessage $true

     This should basically catch and delete incoming emails from the outside except when they are coming from domains needed for direct guest join. Remember, that this is the very reason to needing -processexternalmeetingmessages in the first place. Federated domains are something different but might also be allowed to book rooms. 
    -SenttoMemberOf is obviously checking a group. Maybe it even allows to feed it a ROOMLIST group here. This would be nice, since you very likely already have roomlists (=list of rooms) for using the places service in outlook. Never tried it, so pls do your own tests.

     

     

  • Harald_Steindl's avatar
    Harald_Steindl
    Iron Contributor
    Jul 05, 2022

    JoeNickell 
    Authentication is yet another dimension but I was referring to passcode protected meetings, which is the default nowadays.

    In order for authentication to work, the user needs to have a zoom account, which is hardly the case for a Teams room, right? ==> this does not make any sense in a trans-platform aka guest join call.

  • JoeNickell's avatar
    JoeNickell
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 27, 2022

    In general we found the Zoom host needs disable authentication, and must setup a meeting with a time, not ask to join a Zoom room. This applies to paid users that can set the Authentication. Adding a Zoom meeting from a free personal account was easy.

  • MarkL's avatar
    MarkL
    Iron Contributor
    Jun 24, 2022

    "Configure the Teams Rooms' Exchange Online room mailbox to process invites for third-party meetings."

     

    Rather than process invites from ALL third parties, what would be preferable and more secure would be an option "process invites from Teams federated domains" (ie, based off the federated business partners defined in TAC). Maybe something for the roadmap?

  • Harald_Steindl's avatar
    Harald_Steindl
    Iron Contributor
    Jun 20, 2022

    As long as the Zoom meeting is not protected with a passcode, it indeed works perfectly.
    However, passcode protected meetings fail (at least on my Yealink A20).
    However this works as expected on a MTRoWindows, just for the records.
    ==> There seems to be a bug in the DGJ URL parser.
    Double check yourself:

    1.Setup a passcode protected Zoom meeting. You will get a join link in the form of:

             https://us06web.zoom.us/j/12356789?pwd=sdflkjdflafjalrdfsgeg   
    This does not work on my MTRoA. You will see an error about a too long meeting code (which is a hint, right?)
    2. Now stripp the pwd part and try to join the following meeting
              https://us06web.zoom.us/j/12356789 
    You will see it works, IF you do have an USB keyboard or touchscreen to manually enter the passcode.

     

    This looks like a bug to me.
    Matt-Taylor

    Thanks for reading
    HST

  • Ohio1591's avatar
    Ohio1591
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 07, 2022

    Very Exciting Matt! Do you have a timeline for when WebEx will work? 

     

    Thanks,

    Eric