Your team is gathered in a Teams Room for a project review, but the customer’s invitation is for a Zoom meeting. You want to use the room’s audio, video, and displays, share the presentation, and stay connected to the conversation. You shouldn’t have to give up your room’s setup just because the meeting is on another platform.
Whether your organization uses Teams or Zoom Meetings today, people need the flexibility to meet with customers, partners, and colleagues on a range of platforms. Direct Guest Join will allow Teams Rooms to join Zoom Meetings and Zoom Rooms to join Teams meetings. Microsoft and Zoom are building on that foundation with Cross-Platform Meeting Connect, to address some of the most requested needs of people joining meetings from a conference room, regardless of the platform they use.
The goal is a more complete room experience for the everyday cross-platform meetings that bring organizations together. Planned improvements to sharing, meeting visibility, room controls, and HD video are designed to help people contribute confidently using the room’s capabilities.
Share ideas from the room
A more seamless room experience also means making it easy to share and view content. With planned HDMI sharing, people will be able to connect a laptop to the room and share content directly into the meeting. The room will also be able to display content shared by other participants, helping everyone follow the same presentation or document.
Stay connected to people and the conversation
Knowing who is in the meeting helps people collaborate with confidence. A participant roster is designed to show the meeting participant list on room display and update as people join and leave. It will give in-room participants a clearer view of who is in the meeting especially when some attendees are not visible in the current video layout.
Enhanced chat visibility will help everyone in the room follow both parts of the meeting conversation by bringing read-only chat into the room layout alongside the meeting video. People will be able to show or hide the chat panel as needed, without having chat appear unexpectedly over video. This experience is read-only: participants will be able to view chat supplied by the meeting platform but not compose or send messages from the room itself.
Use familiar room controls
People should be able to rely on the controls in front of them. With Cross-Platform Meeting Connect, planned improvements will keep room hardware and touch console controls synced with the hosted meeting, prioritizing mute, unmute, and end-call for the initial delivery. That synchronization is intended to preserve the room's behavior people expect and reduce uncertainty about whether the room is muted or has left the call.
Keep people and content in view
For rooms with two displays, we are introducing a layout that uses each screen for a different purpose: shared content on one screen and the participant gallery on the other. This would let in-room attendees follow a presentation while keeping remote participants in view.
Video improvements support sending and receiving video at up to 1080p for Teams meeting on Zoom Rooms. Actual resolution will depend on the meeting platform’s policies, the room device, and network conditions. The experience is designed to adapt when bandwidth is constrained, or hardware cannot sustain the higher resolution, with meeting reliability remaining a priority.
More flexibility, with clear expectations
Microsoft and Zoom share a goal of helping people collaborate across platforms while making better use of their meeting rooms. These improvements are designed for both directions, with a focus on the capabilities people need most in everyday room meetings. A guest meeting will still differ from a native meeting, and this work does not extend every enhancement to every platform.
As the integration evolves, cross-platform meeting experiences will move forward together. Individual capabilities will depend on support from both the room system and the meeting platform, helping ensure people see controls that work for their meeting experience.
What’s next
With Cross-Platform Meeting Connect, Teams Rooms will make it easier for people to join, participate, and collaborate in meetings hosted on other platforms, helping organizations get more from their meeting room experience.
Stay tuned as we continue working toward more ways to make cross-platform meetings easier and more connected.
Microsoft