Microsoft Teams Rooms systems - join button for known external services

Brass Contributor

I've spent a couple of weeks down the rabbit hole of video calls between us an other organisations. We want to be as flexible as possible, allowing externals to join our conferences from their endpoints, and supporting our users joining external conferences from our MTRs.

 

We have set up CVI trials with Pexip, BlueJeans and Polycom. All three address the external dialing in to our call pretty well, but we're sometimes finding a bit of a tug of war over "no we'll host, that way we know it'll work in our meeting rooms. You join OUR meeting". When both orgs want to host, it's less clear.

 

Webex and Zoom both have well-known SfB/Lync gateways that may be included in the meeting invite. Zoom it's MeetingID@lync.zoom.us. Webex it's ConfID.TenantID@lync.webex.com. Both only work if the right bits are switched on in the respective Zoom/Webex tenancy, but if they are the address in SfB/Lync format should be included in the meeting invite.

 

I've been practicing with users identifying these invites and dialing them in our MTR rooms. That works, but it's pretty manual.

 

I saw in this thread

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Skype-for-Business-IT-Pro/SRS-V2-externally-hosted-meetings/m...

that there's code in the Teams app on the MTR that parses meeting invites and looks for https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/ URLs to turn in to Join buttons. It would be amazing if that same process came across an anything@lync.zoom.us or anything@lync.webex.com address in the call it added a Join button to the console which dialed that SIP address.

 

@Ilya Bukshteyn I doubt it's a high priority for anyone, but it would look really slick if it worked and would go some way to me being able to sell these MTR rooms to management as good for more than just internal meetings.

4 Replies

@ryan-whitehelm we hear you and are looking at various approaches for better supporting external / occasional meetings on other meeting services on MTR.

@Ilya Bukshteyn Very happy with what was announced at Ignite on this front, can't wait to start testing it.

 

Quick question, in the blog at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-New-in-Microsoft-Teams-Ignite-201... it mentions "This capability will be supported on a new generation of meeting room devices with embedded web technology."

 

I'm in the middle of a rollout of Logitech Tap with Intel NUC MTR systems. Are we likely to see this functionality as part of the regular upgrade cycle, or does "a new generation" mean we'd need new hardware for the new features?

Sorry for the confusion on that language. All MTRs will get this capability as a software update. We had to put that language in for Cisco as not all (older) Cisco VTCs can be updated with webrtc support.

@Ilya Bukshteyn Ahhh, that makes perfect sense. In that case I'm back to being excited for this and can't wait for it to ship. Thanks for the quick response!