Microsoft, for many, is the go-to software provider for businesses large and small. And Microsoft Teams has quickly become the dominant communication and collaboration tool, operating across multiple devices such as smart phones, tablets and PCs. As an industry-leading expert in Microsoft Teams integration, Internet Videocommunications has been commissioned to team up with countless clients and navigate them through the complexities and nuances of implementing enterprise-wide solutions. Here are just five of the key questions that need to be answered to ensure a successful deployment across your organisation.

As a Microsoft ‘Reference Design’, all Microsoft Teams Room systems are required to consist of only Microsoft-certified components. Any aspect of the system which is not certified is highly likely to put the operational stability of the solution at risk and impact on the performance of microphones, speakers and cameras.

The Microsoft ‘Reference Design’ may be set up for either single or dual monitor configuration, each supplied with a 1080p digital video signal from the in-room Teams computer running the Microsoft Teams Room software.

On the software side, you will need to have a Microsoft Teams license and also have either Exchange Online or Exchange On-Premise. It is also essential to ensure that all the appropriate ports are suitably configured and the proper protocols enabled for access via your firewalls or proxy servers.

The Teams Rooms Premium license adds a managed service component to the Teams Rooms Standard license. This managed service is run by Microsoft and will help you manage, monitor, and maintain Teams Rooms across your organisation. It will help you have an optimal experience with Teams Rooms.

For decades, an organisations would design their network with the focus on connecting to an internal data-centre. But with the rapid growth of cloud services such as Microsoft 365, the traditional network designs are not necessarily valid anymore. Understanding the optimal way to connect from your home or office to Microsoft Teams will provide the best Microsoft 365 experience, especially for audio and video. With the emergence of ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) and ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) offerings, much of the traffic previously destined for internal corporate servers is going outside the corporate network to cloud service providers using the public internet.

Because of the way the Microsoft network is designed, placing edge sites as close as possible to users around the world, the time you spend on the internet is greatly reduced. By reducing the amount of time your traffic spends on the open internet, you minimise the risk of jitter, latency, and packet loss, all of which can impact the audio and video quality and therefore the user experience in the meeting. The Microsoft network has been architected to focus on Microsoft-specific technologies and not the general-purpose internet.

Best practice is to introduce local internet breakouts, where possible to do so. However, this is a large and important topic to get right, which is why it forms a critical part of Internet Videocommunications’ consultancy process. There is a lot to discuss and decisions to be made regarding where you should have local internet breakouts and whether every office or every location needs to have a local internet breakout. 

But, if you schedule a meeting with attendees from around the globe, where will that meeting be hosted? The answer is . . . it depends on who joins the meeting first. Even if you are the one who sends out the Teams meeting invite, but a colleague in a distant country is the first one to join the meeting, that meeting will be hosted in the Microsoft 365 data centre for that country. This means that your media must travel to that data centre where it is then combined with the media from your colleague and sent back to you. The first person to join a Teams meeting dictates where that meeting will be hosted. The theory is that most attendees of a meeting will be in the same basic region and it really doesn't matter who joins first.

However, it does matter if ten people are invited to a meeting and nine of them are in region A and the tenth is in region B. If that tenth invitee joins the meeting first, the media from the other nine invitees in region A must now travel back and forth, to and from, the Microsoft data centre in region B in order to be joined.

Such a project will undoubtedly be a collective effort, drawing upon different people from different departments. You will definitely need someone familiar with your network to make sure switch ports are set up correctly and firewalls and proxies are properly configured. You will also need someone with access rights to create an Exchange mailbox, change passwords, and perform end-user management. If you are enabling dial-in calling, then your telecommunications department can help to assign telephone numbers. And you will need to work with your facilities group so that everything you are adding to the building is compliant.

 It is no surprise that few organisations have the know-how and the resources in-house to deal with the complexities and challenges of rolling out Microsoft Teams Rooms. This is where Internet Videocommunications can help.

As an expert systems Integrator, with vast, real-world experience of deploying audio-visual solutions in a Microsoft Teams environment, Internet Videocommunications is uniquely set up to fill any and all of the service gaps you may have, whether that is providing a range of consultancy services to assess and validate the solution, or producing the design specification for your boardroom, lecture theatres and conference suites, or providing professional installation / commissioning / training / maintenance support services; or project managing the whole process from start to finish.

Once up and running, the simplicity in communicating and collaborating using Microsoft Teams Rooms belies the numerous considerations and preparation needed prior to implementation.  

Team up with Internet Videocommunications and let us walk you through every step of the way, bring your collaborative ideas to life and ensure that your organisation gets the very best experience that Microsoft Teams Rooms have to offer.