Using Teams in shared meeting rooms - advice needed please

[justanotherday]

Hi all, we have been setting up Teams in shared meeting rooms, whilst replacing legacy VC equipment. 

We have setup the computer with its own account named after the meeting room, however it's been pointed out that if someone books a private meeting using that account, then when others are using the room the calendar can be browsed. Therefore people have resorted into logging in as them selves, which isn't ideal.

I wondered what others have done when implementing Teams into meeting rooms? We are using just a mini computer, Windows 10, camera, speaker phone with Office 365 installed. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Thanks in advance

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@justanotherday Hello!
There is a long list of WHY a Teams Meeting Room is worth it aka an even longer list why having a fixed PC in the meeting room is mostly not a good idea.
You stumbled across just one topic out of this list.
My advice is to go strictly BYOM (bring your own meeting) where the users shuffle in their own notebook with their UC client and hook up via HDMI/USB to connect to fixed installed mic/speaker/camera + a large display
OR
bite tht bullet and install an MTR. Its cost will pay off pretty fast.
bye

HST

[#3]

What Harald says below makes much more sense. Microsoft Teams Rooms are designed to avoid all the pitfalls you've experienced. You could even use the existing USB camera and speakers as long as Microsoft Teams Certified and just buy the OEM compute and touch control, such as the Crestron C100 or Poly G10 or Logitech TAP

[#4]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply. Everything we have used is Teams certified. We used a computer so other applications could also be used, i.e zoom etc. I'm not sure what an MTR is, I suspect a dedicated device? If so we wanted the flexibility rather than have a kiosk type of solution. Is there a roombooking type of solution for Teams? A lighter version? Thanks

[#5]

A MTR is a dedicated Windows 10 IOT device running a custom Microsoft Teams app. It can join 3rd parties such as Zoom and WebEx meetings too. See here for a full overview I did. https://youtu.be/sSOlQh4T_VM

Teams also have room booking panels that can go outside the room too using the same room resource account. https://youtu.be/Xp4l5tcoCt8

[#6]

You want to have the flexibility, point taken.
However this does not mean, that you need to have a meeting room PC with all sorts of clients loaded like Zoom, Teams, Webex, etc.
Like it or not, but "adding" another UC platform is much more than simply double klicking setup.exe on a PC. Means, if you do have a perfectly working Teams setup, it by no means guarantees you, that performance will be the same when starting gotomeeting or so.
Which means, it might be an idea to take a deeper look into cloud-sided video interop, like an MTR (MS Teams Rooms System) is able to join Zoom and Webex Meetings natively.

Just last week I had an interesting result at a customer site:
They had a perfectly working Teams setup with an external soundbar incl. mic array and Huddly IQ camera. However, when using this very Audio/Video-Setup with a PC running the webex client, it simply performed very poorly audiowise.
Technically it should be easy because of plug'n'play, USB, etc... but in reality it is NOT.
External devices like cameras, mic arrays and such are much, much smarter than they used to be some years ago. So, you cannot simply assume, that every hardware will work with every UC client.
Long story short: As much as I understand you wanting to bring the personal computer experience into the meeting room, you might get your fingers burnt. A meeting room is not a personal desk, jsut plain and simple.

[#7]

Thanks, we have used Windows soft codecs for Skype for Business for some time. These have worked really well, given Skype is a much lighter client for small pods and meeting rooms. I think because Teams is aimed at collaboration it doesn't seem to work well in a 'Zoom Room' type of scenario. For large conferencing (Seminars, live events) we have been using Pexip MCU with Cisco Telepresence however that's now quite challenging for simplicity of use, especially now we predominantly have a Teams infrastructure. We want to make all rooms flexible and simple to use with a common interface. However if we have Teams, it seems strategically complex in terms of room booking function, dropping in and just making VC calls, and boardroom conferencing etc.

I thought they may have developed a lighter client for ad hoc meeting use. And given consideration for confidentiality, i.e. private meetings in calendars, the ability to clear down call lists.

We have been using Yamaha YVC-330 and YVC-1000 units, Jabra Panacast 20 & 50 and now Yealink UVC84 camera's. All using NUC 8i7HVKVA, a good spec due to the overhead of being a soft codec. So we don't encounter any latency from codec post processing.

[#8]

reg. room booking.
What kind of complexity do you mean?
You can either
a) reserve the room via an calendar invite via Outlook
b) Do an adhoc reservation directly at the scheduling panel at the door (no matter if you use an MS Teams panel Or another form of scheduling display)
c) Simply walk into the room and redirect your phone, tablet or bluetooth enabled notebook via proximity join to the MTR in the room.
Especially with the newer MTRoA (A for Android) units formerly known as Collaboration Bars one get get prettty inexpensive appliances, which are easy to deploy, manage and use.
MTRs are always on devices even when based on Windows aka MTRoW .
Just because something runs on windows does not mean, it does have to behave like a desktop PC.