I set up 2 Teams Rooms for one of my clients and in learning how to set up and use a Teams Room and train the client, there seems to be a LOT left to be desired with Teams Room, especially for the price of the Teams Room Pro license!
- The Teams Room includes an Audio Conference license, but if you want to use it you have to send the invite AS the room. So users needing this would need to be a delegated admin of the room resource. And who wants to send out an invite from "Main Conference Room on behalf of Jane" to their customers? This means each user needs their own Audio Conference license* to send out their own invites and then add the Teams room. What is the point of the room having an audio conference license?
- If you add a Teams Room to your invite, the attendees are shown the location of the meeting as that conference room, the only clue it is an online/teams meeting is the Teams info in the invite's message body. Then when the attendee gets an Outlook reminder for the meeting it actually shows the location as the conference room NOT a Teams meeting.
- No minutes are included so you can't actually use the Teams Room as a conference phone unless you add minutes. I would think for the cost of Teams Room Pro it would include a Teams Phone with Calling Plan license. So if you just want to have a conference call you have to setup a whole Teams meeting and then just use the audio portion.
This has been a very difficult journey. Explaining all of this to my client after convincing them to spend a good amount of money on a Teams Room setup (equipment cost, to be fair, is not a Microsoft problem) and then continually telling them the limitations and how they need to spend more money for additional licenses to get the features they want is not a good solution. For those looking to sell a Teams Room, do the research first and be warned it is NOT a cheap or easy solution!
*Thankfully the Audio Conference license is now free, that's a big thank you out to Microsoft for that!