As more people transition back to the office and others continue to work from home, it’s more important than ever to ensure people have the right tools to stay connected.
Microsoft offers a broad portfolio of devices, spanning personal and shared spaces, that enable high quality, inclusive calling and meeting experiences as people connect and collaborate no matter their location.
New Microsoft Teams capabilities we are announcing today will enable customers to manage all their Teams devices, including Microsoft Teams Rooms, from the Teams Admin Center. These advancements encompass new powerful features, allowing IT admins to simplify, customize, and automate Teams device management. With these new capabilities, not only can admins now rely on Teams Admin Center to view all their Teams devices, they can also perform all of the device management tasks there, in a single location.
We are empowering admins by surfacing the data and controls that enable proactive device management, automating procedures, consolidating all management settings, configurations, and troubleshooting to help admins manage their devices with greater granularity and efficiency.
These capabilities are starting to roll out to customers now.
Let us take a closer look at the new features.
Simplifying Teams device setup
After unboxing the device, plug in the cables, and power it on. Depending on the device and its usage, users will login using either their personal corporate Teams credentials or those assigned to the device as a resource account (click to learn more on configuring Meeting Rooms).
Once the device is signed in, people can start using it right away. Simultaneously, the device is automatically enrolled into Teams Admin Center, so administrators can begin managing it immediately. For IP phones and collaboration bars, this same process enrolls the device into Microsoft Endpoint Manager as well (with the account Intune license).
One place for granular device management
Teams Admin Center is the admin’s single portal to manage all their Team devices and ensure they are always up to date and ready for use, admins can use the Teams Admin Center to track and manage their inventory for a scaled management operations.
Admins can organize their view using filters, see device details and current device health status, or view in-depth activity and call quality data, as well as take necessary actions for any device.
They can also take actions like export the entire list for offline analysis, download logs, change device settings, and perform or schedule tasks as restarting a device.
We’ve also added the ability to automatically update phones and collaboration bars, ensuring software remains up to date. Previously, when Microsoft released a certified update through the Teams Admin Center, administrators would manually push the update to devices deployed in their tenants. To make this even easier, we’ve given admins the option to allow devices to automatically receive and apply updates. You can define how an update is managed for each device individually, by adjusting its auto-update settings in the Teams Admin Center.
To help admins save time and efficiently roll out a fleet of devices, they can use the Teams Admin Center to perform bulk actions like applying device settings and restarting devices.
Bulk tasks become more efficient with the new tagging capability, giving admins the option of adding tags to group devices by categories like department, location, or any other grouping context used in their organization. Tagging simplifies device management by granting admins the ability to filter devices by any tag or combination of tags, and complete tasks for multiple devices at once.
Proactively inspect device health
To ensure a meeting will run successfully we want to make sure every device is powered on and available for use. For this purpose, the Teams Admin Center provides device health status. From the device inventory view, admins can easily inspect the health status for any device and filter easily to find the devices that need attention. Additionally, for Teams Rooms, admins can also inspect if any peripheral device, like a camera or display is disconnected, right from within Teams Admin Center. Admins now have the insight they need to take proactive actions so that user productivity is not impacted.
Another key element to ensure a meeting will run successfully is the call quality of the meeting participants’ devices. To help identify call quality issues and resolutions, Admins can now view call quality data for the meeting. From device inventory view, click on any device to see details of the call quality for last 7 days. Admins can also drill into individual meetings where the call quality was poor by going to Activity tab in details page.
Secure device management access and delegate administration to partners
Managing devices in Teams Admin Center is designed to be simple and intuitive; however, we understand some of our customers rely on outside support. For those customers, we will enable the ability to securely delegate administration through Partner Center, so that partners can administer and manage the devices on the organization behalf, while ensuring secure authorized device access. Admins can ensure their devices are secure from unauthorized access from the M365 Admin Portal. By using Microsoft Teams administrator roles, admins can designate which individuals can manage their Teams devices.
Today we have already dozens of partners trained to help you manage your devices.
As we continue to advance the device management experience in Teams Admin Center with more capabilities, we aim to continue delivering more proactive device management features, automated procedures, and provisioning options to streamline and optimize admin’s device management experience all in one portal.
For more information on device management in Teams Admin Center, click here.
