Our esteemed Microsoft Teams News Show experts convened earlier this week to discuss the fallout from a busy Microsoft Ingite, which saw announcements across Copilot, Teams, Microsoft 365 and beyond.
We’ve picked out five key points from the special 45-minute-plus episode.
Microsoft Goes Premium
Microsoft has used the ‘Premium’ tag with Microsoft Teams for some time (Teams Premium includes a bundle of advanced features, and an upgraded Teams Room subscription was called Premium before being rebranded as Pro).
However, Ignite saw Microsoft roll this out to other areas of the Microsoft 365 portfolio, including SharePoint and the revitalised Planner.
SharePoint Premium will use AI to enhance content experiences, optimise business processes, and prepare content for Microsoft Copilot.
Meanwhile, To-Do, Tasks and Projects are being merged into a new Planner experience, with Microsoft charging extra for premium features.
Our panellists said it was interesting to see Microsoft adopt this approach, highlighting some of the confusion it has caused around AI-powered features such as Intelligent Recap, which will soon be bundled in with Copilot licences but was previously only available with a Teams Premium Licence.
“A whole bunch of products got a Premium offer,” Tom Arbuthnot said. “Microsoft seems to be rolling into a model of ‘core’, but for just a little bit extra, you can get these [extra] features, which is a new direction.
“It started off with certain products, but now it feels like it’s going across the suite. You buy E5 to get your core experience, but if you want [more], you have to pay a little bit extra per product.”
Is Microsoft Really Democratising AI?
The most hyped technology of the year has undoubtedly been generative AI, with Microsoft Copilot garnering much attention. That said, the price and minimum licensing requirements have raised a few eyebrows. A business licence costs $30 per user per month (on a 12-month contract), and organisations must buy at least 300 licences – equalling an eyewatering $108,000 a year.
Kevin Kieller from enableUC said that the most upvoted question in open Q&As at Ignite was regarding when Microsoft will make Copilot available for smaller businesses – a question which went unanswered.
“One of the big stories was what was not announced,” he said.
“What about the democratisation of AI… or organisations that just want to experiment with it? I thought that was a real missed opportunity for Microsoft… even if they just said it will be available in the New Year.
Microsoft has always been about the democratisation of technology and AI, but this is a product that is ‘generally available’ with a lot of asterisks.”
Microsoft is Playing Nice with Meta
Microsoft Ignite finally saw Microsoft announce general availability for its virtual meeting experiences – namely Immersive Spaces and Microsoft Mesh.
Both will be available in January and see Microsoft partner with Meta to provide VR experiences with Quest headsets, Notably disregarding Microsoft’s own more-expensive HoloLens.
UC Today’s Rob Scott and Arbuthnot agreed that this is almost certainly because of the Quest’s price.
“The HoloLens was built for industrial use cases; it’s not a device you’re going to roll out to lots and lots of people,” Arbuthnot said.
Our panellists were unsure of whether Mesh and VR meetings, in general, will live up to the hype of two years ago when Mesh was announced. The general consensus was that there are no clear use cases – or at least not enough to make Mesh mainstream in collaboration, while some said that Mesh has already fallen behind platforms already available for VR meetings.
The standout Teams Phone Announcement
Microsoft made a number of Teams Phone announcements at Ignite, but one in particular caught the eyes of our panellists.
Voice Isolation will build on noise cancellation to better remove unwanted background noise and improve voice clarity. It works by learning the sound of a meeting participant’s voice, after which it can isolate and amplify only this particular person.
Ryan Herbst from unifiedcommunications.com hailed it as a “standout, rockstar feature”.
“This is super significant in terms of experience and, in spite of major advances from the device manufacturers, I think all of us still hear quite a bit of background noise on calls,” he said.
“It can be really disruptive, and the other interesting benefit is, now we’re getting everyone to record their voice, this feature begins to kind of open the door to some of the other AI features… so it’s a mainstream way to get people into this.”
Microsoft is Embracing BYOD (sort of)
Microsoft has changed its stance on meeting rooms in recent times and announced a set of features that will improve the experience for people meeting on Teams in non-Teams Rooms environments (something that has been clunky in the past).
Two key features were highlighted during the special Ignite show: a new shared display mode and device discovery.
Teams now has a new shared display mode that detects when a user is connected to an A/V peripheral and external display in a BYOD room. The user can join with room audio, which connects to the A/V and optimises the gallery for in-room participants.
This minimises what others can see from other windows on a laptop, and users can control what in-room participants see on the shared display from the device.
Secondly, BYOD room peripherals can be quickly discovered and linked to a resource account by IT. This provides insights on call performance and room usage, as well as allowing for easy device monitoring. This provides a clear picture of shared spaces in an organisation.
“Microsoft is kind of acknowledging BYOD as a thing now,” Arbuthnot said. “Previously, it was very much ‘MTR is the right answer, and BYOD is a fuss’. “Now they’re saying that if [an organisation] is doing BYOD, they’ll enable a reasonable experience.”
