Last Updated on January 21, 2021 by GrahamWalsh
Microsoft Teams Rooms has an excellent feature that allows you wireless connect to a room system and add it to your meeting without touching a shared device. I have an overview here including a video demonstration.
With a phone/tablet or Windows PC, you can start a meeting by selecting a nearby MTR using Bluetooth or by the Suggested room list which is a list of rooms that you’ve used recently on your calendar coming from the Exchange address room list. The device is then used as the content sharing source.
There are some rules to be aware of when using these features and the tips and tricks that follow will help optimize the experience.
- Firstly, this is only available on Windows, iOS, and Android devices. It is not available for MacOS Teams yet, nor is it possible in the web browser version of Teams.
- Ensure Bluetooth is enabled on your Windows 10 IOT compute. It is on by default, but if it was disabled for any reason it needs to be re-enabled. Then reboot the Microsoft Teams Room system device.
3. Organisers Presence state needs to be set something other than Do Not Disturb (DnD). DnD prevents proximity join from working.
4. For Auto Answer to work on the MTR, be sure to enable ‘Automatically accept proximity-based meetings invitations’ from Device Settings
5. Location based services need to be enabled on the PC for the Teams application to listen for the Bluetooth beacon coming off the MTR.
6. Confirm the correct 32-bit/64-bit version of teams that is installed matches with the Windows 10 32 bit/64 bit OS version. In the Microsoft Teams Application – go to the badge with your picture or initials on the top right of the application, scroll to About and select Version.
To determine if your running 32- or 64-bit version of windows, you can check this in the settings or via the command prompt.
wmic os get Caption, BuildNumber, OSArchitecture, Version
7. The phone/tablet and or Microsoft Teams client running on the PC need to have network access to the MTR. For example, if I join a wireless network that is not on the same network as the MTR, the banner will not pop up to tell me that an MTR is nearby.
8. The Teams user and the MTR need to be in the same Teams tenant as well or from a federated/whitelisted tenant.
Another common question I get is that the Bluetooth signal is weak, or the compute is mounted in a rack in a comms room, so not in the room. I have tested extending the Bluetooth from the NUC to an external Bluetooth adapter such as the Asus BT400 and extended it with a standard USB extension cable such as this one. Colleagues have also tested using network-based extenders such as these from Crestron. This means you can bring Bluetooth nearer to the users. Just note that you must disable the onboard Bluetooth on the NUC so you don’t have two Bluetooth signals.
Additional Sources of information. Thank you to Greg and Randy, for posting
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-rooms-december-update/bc-p/1361295/highlight/true#M5474
Also, thanks to Paul Gurman for pulling a lot of this information together too.
Any comments, feel free to ask below.
Also published on Medium.