Microsoft Teams have been the highly adopted collaborative platform in few months time.It has been helping a ton worldwide and the new features that is been released every now and then makes us stay connected and expands the efficiency in every organization who have been using them.

By default Microsoft Certified Room systems are forward compatible with the new Skype for Business or Teams services while maintaining the same client user experience.Usually when any organization has only Skype then these meeting rooms will have the options only Skype enabled on them.

In this article we will be looking at how to enable the existing Skype room systems to have the capacity to host Teams Meetings in them.

Example screen of a Skype room system panel where we have the below options on the supported meeting mode while configuring them at the initial stage .

These devices are basically on KIOSK mode running on recommended versions of Windows 10 currently supported one being 1909 at the time of writing this blog.

Ideally when a Skype room system account have been migrated to Teams with all the prerequisites this mode on the meeting room devices needs to be changed to support Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.

This can be done by using the local admin credentials of this Skype room system , logging into the system context and change the mode to support both Teams and Skype. In a real scenario for a small scale deployment for lesser than 10 rooms changing them manually from the local IT support is possible. But in a huge deployments where there are 100 plus systems deployed across the globe and making them change manually will be a uncomfortable experience.

This supported meeting mode on the Skype room systems is controlled via an XML file present on below location. This location is standard for all the meeting rooms running on KIOSK mode and have a file named skypesettings.xml

C:\Users\Skype\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.SkypeRoomSystem_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState

At startup these devices looks up for this XML file named SkypeSettings.xml on the above location. If it finds them it applies the configuration settings indicated by the XML file then deletes the XML file. The best thing is that we can mention only the changes that we require on the system on the XML file and it will update the delta changes and keep the other settings as same.

In order to enable Teams, Skype and have Teams as default client we can use the below XML

<SkypeSettings>
    <IsTeamsDefaultClient>true</IsTeamsDefaultClient>
    <SkypeMeetingsEnabled>true</SkypeMeetingsEnabled>
    <TeamsMeetingsEnabled>true</TeamsMeetingsEnabled>
</SkypeSettings>

Now this XML can be easily pushed to all the Skype Room Systems via Intune Scripting Profile.

Below are the prerequisites before performing this action:

1. The Skype Room Systems accounts must have thee Teams license assigned to them. This offers an easy migration path from Skype for Business to Teams by just enabling Teams on the device.
2. The Skype Room Systems must have been registered on Microsoft Intune to target this intune scripting profile to them.

Login to Microsoft Intune- Navigate to Device Configuration – Create the Scripts as below. Ensure the script settings have all the default settings. Target them to the meeting room devices which requires this change.

Copy save them as ps1 and Use the below script on the script settings page.

$target = "C:\Users\Skype\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.SkypeRoomSystem_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\SkypeSettings.xml"
$xml = "<SkypeSettings>
    <IsTeamsDefaultClient>True</IsTeamsDefaultClient>
    <SkypeMeetingsEnabled>false</SkypeMeetingsEnable
    <TeamsMeetingsEnabled>true</TeamsMeetingsEnabled>
</SkypeSettings>"
$xml | Out-File -FilePath $target -Force

After the next azure AD sync is completed on the targeted devices we can see the XML file to be successfully deployed on the below location.

Also we can see the overview of assigned and failed devices on the intune script profile. In our case it was successful since it deployed to targeted system without any issue.

Once the Skype room systems gets this XML and usually these systems reboots every night to check for the system updates install them as a maintenance window. During that time this XML will be updated since the device will be rebooted. Once this change has been applied to all the systems the Intune Script profile can be removed since it is a one time configuration change on the systems after the user accounts have the teams enabled.

Option2:

Create storage container in Azure , store the XML file and make intune to pull the xml file from there. Keeping this option is beneficial just in case if we need to modify the XML file frequently for device settings.

Navigate to azure portal – Storage accounts – Select File shares

Create a new file share for the pushing the Teamsxml

Once it is shared we can use the appropriate url in the script.

Below script can be used for the same

$source = "storage file source url"
$target = "C:\Users\Skype\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.SkypeRoomSystem_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\SkypeSettings.xml"
Invoke-Webrequest $source -Outfile $target
$xml | Out-File -FilePath $target -Force

Regards

Sathish Veerapandian