A momentous June for Microsoft Teams featured a variety of news, from introducing spatial audio for immersive meetings to revelations about which licenses will grant access to Microsoft's AI-powered productivity tool, Copilot.
There have also been significant updates for Teams Rooms for both its Android and Windows products, not limited to Microsoft delaying the end of personal terms Teams Rooms hardware licenses.
Graham Walsh, Microsoft MVP & Product Specialist at Neat, told UC Today about what new features Teams Rooms on Android has received or will soon receive — and whether it means the level of flexibility and innovation brings it closer than ever towards equity with its Windows counterpart.
Walsh explained that "Update Two" for this calendar year is rolling out at different times for different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), as some updates are only available through the Teams Admin Centre, where some OEMs bundle it. Some customers will have to wait for their firmware to be delivered with it.
"But one of probably the biggest things for government customers in the US is GCC high support," Walsh said, "so they've been able to take these Android devices and register into their Teams app and sensor and get them online." Although, Walsh added that, for the moment, that only applies to one (currently unknown) OEM.
A more general feature for Android for Teams Rooms is the capability for additional USB cameras on the device.
"Android device powers have always been an all-in-one device," Walsh explained. "Logitech has this roommate, this appliance, where you can potentially plug in additional cameras. So this is where Update Two will allow that additional camera to be plugged in. But I'm also also guessing some of the room bars, they will all have USB ports. Potentially, they could have an additional camera, maybe at the back of the room looking at a presenter, in there as well."
Alongside the additional camera, Android can now support an alternative option of a content camera or magic whiteboard, which was planned when the solution was initially launched. "The content capture," Walsh added, "so if you've got a traditional analogue whiteboard and want to digitize that into a meeting, Android now supports this. This has been on Windows for quite a while, and now you can have this content camera on Android."
There are five or six certified vendors for content cameras, but at the moment, the exact list of which Android vendors are supporting this content camera option is unknown.
The current ambiguity doesn't particularly help customers who want to feel excited about their product updates, as Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud, affirmed to UC Today, "It's tricky when you've got so many OEMs and so many options and not everybody supporting everything".
Several other usability features were introduced for Rooms for Android, including the option for defaulting a user's layout.
"When you walk into a room, you can default it to content and people," Walsh described the feature. "So we see everyone on the screen, and we see content. This is especially for people who had or have single screens. We see a lot of meetings based on single-screen devices now or even a larger format display. Previously, if you had some content sharing, were you ready to start your meeting, you wouldn't know who was on video."
The feature won't be available to change through the Teams App and Centre. Instead, users have to decide what layout they want to fix the device in the configuration profile. Users could set it to the front row or just content and gallery.
Another new feature is something that many OEMs had already worked on when they built their own menu or swipe menu to control the camera and the framing.
