Microsoft announce user experience improvements coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms

Microsoft has announced user experience improvements coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows.

Microsoft is aligning the Meet Now and calling experiences to Teams desktop and replacing the “New meeting” control on the Teams room console with Meet (aka Meet now). Microsoft is also replacing the “Dial pad” control on the Teams room console with Call.

With Meet, users can start an ad-hoc meeting with a single tap and invite participants to it. The Calling app provides users functionality to dial PSTN calls where available as well as enable entry point for P2P Teams calls, group Teams calls and P2P federated user calls.

From the home page, users can see the new Meet and call buttons, replacing “New meeting” and “Dial pad” buttons.

Users can select Meet button to initiate Meet now which starts a meeting. Users can then add a participant from the roster search control to invite others to the meeting.

Call app provides entry points to dial pad to dial a number (Calling plan required), as well as the ability to search for people in your organization to make a P2P or group call.

If you have domestic or international calling plan assigned to your Teams Rooms account or have direct routing setup for your tenant with number assigned to the room account, the dial pad is made available for users to dial a number.

Users can also search for users in your organization or a federated organization for P2P calls.

Users can start a group call by searching and adding multiple people to the call.

SIP URI calling is not yet available in Teams only mode, however you can set your device to “Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams (default)” mode to have SIP URI entry point in the call app.

Users can also “Enter a URI” button is present in the call app and allows users to dial in a SIP URI.

This change is only applicable if the Teams rooms are running in Microsoft Teams only or Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams (default) modes. With this change, all P2P calling and group calling functionality that was previously under “New meeting” button is moved under Call. For customers that use SIP URI calling through Skype for Business, Enter SIP URI entry point is available in Microsoft Teams (default) and Skype for Business mode under Call.

The Microsoft Teams Rooms application version 4.11.xx.0 with these changes, will begin rolling out in mid-January and is expected to be complete by mid-February 2022.