Teams Rooms are also persistent; they are physical pieces of hardware that sit inside a room. For the most part, these are fixed pieces of hardware that have cameras and audio equipment and are attached to displays in the room that show the farside participants and external attendees along with video inside.
Participants in the room join within the Teams Room device as their platform, while remote employees join from the standard Teams client from their PC or Mac.
BIZTECH: How can Teams Rooms enhance the collaboration experience that organizations enjoy with Microsoft Teams?
Walters: One of the great things about Microsoft Teams Rooms is the single user interface. Whether it’s on Windows or Android, it’s the same interface. The device is directly registered to Teams, and users click a single button to join the meeting.
While there are ways to join Microsoft Teams without a Teams Room, such as legacy video platforms using the Cloud Video Interop for endpoints, this costs money. And since every endpoint will look different, every interaction is different. This can create some complexity and a learning curve.
Teams Rooms also can enhance collaboration for users that don’t have scheduled meeting times using a feature called Proximity Join. This leverages Bluetooth to find a local meeting room and provides a way to access the Teams Rooms device and join the meeting hands-free.
BIZTECH: What kinds of hardware would one commonly find in Teams Rooms?
Walters: At the very base level, you’ll have cameras to showcase video, which may or may not be integrated into the same appliance; some are all-in-one devices, while others use standalone components. You’ll also have a device that runs the OS, likely a mini-Windows PC running Windows IoT or an Android device. You also need microphones, which could be all-in-one or separate solutions, such as ceiling microphones or puck-style microphones that bring in audio from different portions of the room.