In the current scenario most of the Organizations are running Teams Room systems as their meeting room solution from their Offices. Few of their customers, vendors and partners host their meetings from Zoom ,WebEx or other meeting solutions. In these unique circumstances, we will be hitting in a scenario where there are people attending the meetings from Teams Room from our organization and the meeting sent by vendor or a customer might be Web-Ex or Zoom.

Knowing this requirement Microsoft released a supported Teams App version in the mid of last year for the Room Systems to join Cisco WebEx Meetings from a Teams enabled room system with the direct guest join. Later this option was extended to attend a Zoom Meetings as well from the Teams App version 4.6.20.0. We’ll walk through the procedures to enable Teams Room Devices to join the 3rd party meetings Cisco WebEx and Zoom Meetings.

There are few prerequisites to be met in order to join WebEx and Zoom Meetings from a Teams Room System

1. Make sure the WebEx and the Zoom Meeting URLs are fully whitelisted in your proxy and in your network to fully support this scenario.
2. Configure Office 365 Threat Protection and Link Rewrite exclusion list for WebEx and Zoom Meeting URLs.
3. Configure your Room Mailbox to automatically accept and process the invitation from Zoom and WebEx.
4. Configure this settings in your Room Systems devices , so that they are ready for this functionality.

To make this work for the Room Mailbox Connect to your Office 365 Exchange Online Tenant and check for the current setup for accepting the meeting room from a 3rd party meeting invites by running the below command.

Get-CalendarProcesing -Identity UserPrincipalNameOfRoomMailbox | Fl Identity,ProcessExternalMeetingMessages

In our case the value is set to false which is by default. The ProcessExternalMeetingMessages parameter specifies whether to process meeting requests that originate outside the Exchange organization.

Run this command on the Room Mailbox of the Room System to accept meeting requests from Zoom and WebEx

Set-CalendarProcessing roomnl@ezcloudinfo.com -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True -DeleteComments $False -DeleteSubject $False

Now we could see that the value ProcessExternalMeetingMessages is set to True

The Zoom and Webex meeting URLs needs to be added in the excluded list. This is mainly because these URLs needs to be presented in a readable format for the Room Systems. If there is any ATP policy enabled then its better to add these wild card entries *.webex.com* and *.zoom.com* in the ATP policy like below.

The next step is to Setup the Teams Room Systems to allow them joining Cisco WebEx and Zoom Meetings. There are 2 ways of doing them. If we have only handful of devices we can use the below approach by manually logging in to the room systems with the local admin account and enabling this option Cisco WebEx and Zoom that is present in the settings and in the meetings option.

Furthermore we have option leave join with Room Info by which the meeting we join shows the name of the meeting room when joining the Zoom or WebEx Meeting.

When we select the option Join with Custom Info we have an option to specify the name of our choice and an associated email address for the same. So this is up to us to decide how we need to enable this service on our Room Systems. We can also target few systems that is capable of hosting external meetings with Zoom, Cisco WebEx and leave others to host only meetings within the organization.

If there are large set of devices and this configuration needs to be enabled, then our previous blog steps can be followed to push these configuration via Intune device configuration scripts. We need only these 2 lines in the XML file WebExMeetingsEnabled & ZoomMeetingsEnabled as described in the previous blog.

Now we have enabled this option lets check the meeting join experience from WebEx. When doing this first we need to send one meeting invite from webex account. In below example have sent one test meeting from my webex account to the test device with the account roomnl@ezcloudinfo.com

The meeting is scheduled and it shows up as an upcoming meeting in the WebEx desktop client.

When clicking on join we could see the Cisco WebEx meeting interface from the Teams Meeting Room Device.

And we can see the cisco webex join meeting experience on the Teams Room Device where left side is the meeting room and over the right is the meeting from the WebEx Device.

From the Webex device where the meeting is hosted , we see the Microsoft Teams Meeting Room as host and the participant with video as well.

Similar Experience is shown even when scheduling a Zoom Meeting. The Teams Room Device shows the information at the top of the meeting Zoom which denotes that this meeting invite is from Zoom.

Once clicked on join the Zoom meeting is successfully hosted from Teams Room Device.

From the Zoom Desktop Client the Teams Room Device is also shown as participant.

We can host Webex and Zoom meetings with a seamless experience from a Teams Room Device with just a few clicks. This enables enterprises to accept meeting invitations from Cisco Webex and Zoom to Teams Enabled Room Systems, from which we can attend the meetings from our vendors without further configuration. We can anticipate this option being expanded to other third-party meeting services in the future.

Regards

Sathish Veerapandian