MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Deploying and Managing Microsoft Teams Endpoints Part 2

3. Understanding Team Rooms

Okay, so what exactly is a Microsoft team room? So first off, this is a scenario in which maybe your company has some different conference rooms, some small areas where you want meetings to happen or very large areas where you want meetings to happen. They go from large conference rooms down to what we call small huddle, areas where people can actually have equipment it and host a meeting with somebody else across the world using high definition video audio. They can share content, and it’s meant really to be for any type of meeting of any size. Okay? And the first thing you want to know about this, and I’m going to show this to you in this next little video coming up, is that in order to do this, you have to have what’s called a resource account.

And you’ve heard me mention resource accounts before. A resource account is an account that’s going to be associated to a conference room or a piece of equipment, a device. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Exchange, you’re probably already familiar with this concept as well. But essentially with team rooms, you’ll create what’s called an account, and that account will have what’s called a room mailbox. The room mailbox has to be associated with Exchange. Exchange is going to manage that. Okay. And it’ll support calendar processing and all of that. And this makes it to where someone can essentially schedule a meeting in a conference room.

And that way you don’t have people stepping all over each other over double booking a room or something like that. So it’s important that you have to have that. It’s important that you have that account so that it can have a calendar associated with it and people can schedule meetings and all that. Now when you create your account, it’s important to name it something very descriptive. So, for example, the example I’ve got here for you is let’s say you had a 20 person room and it was located in New York City, and maybe the room was labeled Broadway.

Let’s say you worked in a building and the building had some conference rooms and you named them after street names or something like that in the city like Broadway. So be a good idea to label the account something like NY for New York Broadway. And then at the end of it, in the parentheses you can see we put the limit on how many people could be in that room. So Micro recommends that whatever you name your accounts, you be very descriptive about that. Okay, all right. But that’s the idea of what a team room is. Let’s go and jump right in with team rooms and look at creating an account. And we’ll also look at where this is all going to be managed at in the team’s admin center. Okay.

4. Creating Teams Rooms Resource Account and Managing Teams Devices

Okay so here we are in Portal Microsoft. com. We’re looking at where we can create the resource accounts at. So if you look to the left over here on Portal Microsoft. com, you can click Show All and you’ll see a little resources drop down. So all you got to do is drop that down and you’ll see rooms and equipment. You can click that and you can create resource here by clicking Add Resource. So then you would give it a name. So again if I wanted to do a room and I would say NY Broadway 20 like so. Okay, and then at that point it will have to have an email address associated with it. So in this case I’m going to put 20 NY Broadway 20, all right. And then set your capacity, set your location, new York building, we’ll say Building B, suite 200.

Okay. And then maybe put a phone number in there as well for a phone number that’s going to be associated with it. And then click save. All right. So at that point you’ve created your room and now you got to jump over into Teams. So let’s go over to the Teams Admin center. Right here we’ll click teams. We’re going to jump into Teams Admin Center and we’re going to drop down where it says Devices. This is where your phones are going to be added, your team rooms, this is where your team rooms will be added and they also have what’s called collaboration bars. All right as well but let’s focus on the team rooms for a second.

So this is where we can have our conference rooms, teams rooms, all that as well as our phones. Now one thing that it’s very important that we talk about here is we need to know exactly what type of equipment that we’re going to be putting in this room in order for it to be available. So with our phones and all that, microsoft doesn’t just allow any type of equipment, it has to be certified. And so we got to know what we can add and what we can support. So I’m going to pull up an article here in a second that will let us do that. But once you’ve actually purchased equipment with teams and you’ve added it, it’ll show up here and you’ve got information about the different locations that it can be conference.

You even have these things called configuration profiles as well that you can add which will let you configure some of the different settings for your devices. Such as if you’re going to have device lock after a certain amount of time set a language time zone, date time you can have a little screen saver display on the phone, backlit settings, power settings that can give you an IP phone based whether DHCP is going to hand it an address, DNS information. All that can be configured through here within the Teams admin center. But again in order to do this, you have to have certified equipment that’s going to support it. So let me show you.

Microsoft has a document that you can look at that shows you all the equipment that is certified for teams. Okay? So if you go here and do a search in your search engine for IP Phone Certified for Microsoft Teams and hit enter on that, there is a document right here you can look at IP Phone Certified for Microsoft Teams. You’ll go there and at that point they’ve got it all listed out here for you. Okay? So all the different equipment phone wise that you can support will all be listed here. And of course another thing is the firmware, once you start adding phones into teams, firmware is going to be something else you have to consider.

So you’ll actually select the phone and you can click Update and you can actually update the firmware on the phone utilizing the Teams Admin Center. But it’s important that you go through here and you know exactly what is supported as well. So another thing you got to look at involving Teams Room requirement if you’re buying the equipment is search for this document right here, microsoft Teams Rooms requirement. There’s a document that you can click on right here and this is going to go through step by step the different equipment that’s needed. So if you’re doing this in the real world, for example, they’re telling you here you supported Microsoft Teams Room Systems and you can see the different types of equipment that is certified for setting up a team’s room device.

All right? So actually if I click on this you can actually go here and you can see what it looks like for the management of it. Okay? So a bunch of different as you can see they’ve got this Crestron Flex is sort of what they kind of focus on as far as supporting all of this goes. Okay? But this is something that you can implement in your team’s rooms for device management, all that. But this article kind of breaks down what is supported that you can support inside your team’s room. But again, moral of the story here guys, and this is not really a really heavily tested exam concept at all.

They want you to know what a team’s room is and all that and know what a configuration profile is for configuring the settings of it. But ultimately they’re not going to be testing on knowing all the hardware or any of that. This is mainly for the folks that are if you’re implementing this in the real world, you need to check these articles, out these documents because they kind of break it down step by step for you, okay, and basically tell you exactly what equipment you got to have and then it gets into hooking it all up. There’s a lot of support for this that Microsoft provides you with and if you go through these articles step by step it’s going to give you everything that you need.

5. Additional Components and Concepts for Teams Rooms

Saw previously that Microsoft has documents that tell you exactly what equipment that is certified for teams. And so here’s some of the components that you could consider getting. First off, the touch screen control panel devices with the team’s room software on an application, you can also get a doc extender. This is a little unit that kind of acts as a hub that can extend the distance of equipment in the room. Other things like peripheral devices, meaning camera, microphones, speakers, you can also get external screens. They’ll let you have up to two, maximum of two, and then HDMI input. So that’s going to be your HDMI cables for hooking everything up. Okay. As far as equipment installation goes, you do need to get people involved that you might have a group of people that are going to be involved in setting this up.

Again, it’s very important that you go through those documents that I mentioned in my previous lesson just because it’s going to walk you through step by step on how to do this in the real world. This is not something that I would stress over test wise at all. I keep trying to reiterate that because Microsoft realizes that not everybody has access to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of equipment that’s taking the exam. So they expect you to know what teams rooms and all that is, but they’re not going to really get you into setting all this up. But for you guys that are actually setting up the equipment, those documents will go through with you step by step on how to do that. Okay, so one little example here of sort of the step by step process is figuring out what the room inventory is and plan it all out.

Like, how big is the room? How many people are going to go in the room? Figure out the equipment you’re going to purchase, getthe equipment. Make sure that you’ve got all of your ducks in a row as far as the networking cables, all that coming into the room, or if you’re going to do WiFi or whatever. So make sure all that’s ready, set your configuration up and then go through the process of adopting it and configuring it, making sure it works. And then mainly at that point it’s just a manual. It’s the process of maintenance and operation of it all, keeping the equipment up and making sure everything’s working. Again, they provide you with documentation on all of that information on their site.

So definitely something to look at. Now as far as managing teams rooms, you saw earlier too, if you go to the Teams Admin Center, that’s where you’re going to be able to manage your team’s room. After you’ve created your team’s account, if you’ve got proper licensing, enterprise licensing with teams, then you can go in and you’ll see your team’s room and you’ll be able to set that up. Okay, but this is where you’re going to apply information, configuring your device and managing your devices and all that. You can even tell it to restart your device. If you want you can update firmware through there. This again is all done through the teams admin center and through teams rooms.

So it’s important from an exam perspective. Again you don’t really have to have all this equipment but from an exam perspective you do need to know that you can do this stuff. Meaning for example, first off, if you’re going to have a team room you have to have an account for that. Showed you that already. Secondly, you need to know that you can do things like restart the equipment if you need to update the firmware on the equipment or if you want to apply a configuration profile to configure some of the settings on the equipment. You can do all that and it’s all going to be done through the teams admin center. Okay? Another thing you can do is you can look at meeting activity details. You can see the meeting activity that’s going on as you can see here.

That the audio quality, the duration of all of it, it’s all listed out for you there. Okay? And then lastly you also get a participant summary so you can see everybody who’s participated in connecting into this meeting and see what the audio quality looks like, how long the meeting lasted. As you can see in this example, the meeting lasted 41 minutes and 35 seconds for example. So see what the quality is. Apparently you had one person here whose audio quality, this person right here, their audio quality was poor. That would give us some good details because then we could maybe troubleshoot and figure out well why was that person having to poor audio quality. But all in all, Microsoft pretty much gives you everything you need for managing these meetings and getting an idea of if people maybe are having problems or what their quality, audio quality is and just getting an overall summary of the meeting itself.