Category Archives: Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams – Enable content camera for your meeting rooms whiteboard

Meeting Rooms, Microsoft Teams August 4, 2021 Leave a comment

A content camera can be used with a Microsoft Teams Room system. A content camera collaborates with image-processing software and a whiteboard to enable a presenter to draw on an analog whiteboard and share the content with remote participants.

In this blog we will run through the steps to enable content camera on Teams Room Systems.

There are few prerequisites that needs to be prepared before trying this setup:

  1. This content camera should be pointed at the room’s whiteboard. Please keep in mind that content camera has physical infrastructure requirements that must be considered. It’s usually a piece of equipment (a supported content camera) that hangs from the ceiling and faces the whiteboard.
  2. The writing board must be mandatorily white in color. Other colors are not supported.
  3. A supported content camera as per Microsoft Recommendation on this link needs to be used mandatorily for this functionality.

The camera’s positioning is influenced by the size of the whiteboard used for sharing. The following are some suggestions for board size from Microsoft:

  • 3–6 ft. (0.9–1.8 m) wide — Supported best suited for medium sized rooms.
  • 6–9 ft. (1.8–2.7 m) wide — Recommended best recommended for medium-large rooms.
  • 9–12 ft. (2.7–3.6 m) wide — Supported suitable for board rooms.
  • Above 12 ft. (3.6 m) wide — camera covers 9–12 ft. (2.7–3.6 m) and crops the rest.

The camera can be placed up to 6 in. (152 mm) above the whiteboard’s top and centered on the whiteboard.

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Configure your Teams Room Systems to join WebEx and Zoom Meetings

Meeting Rooms, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 June 21, 2021 Leave a comment

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

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Microsoft Teams Rooms – Start casting content directly from your Mobile Device without setting up a Meeting

Meeting Rooms, Microsoft Teams June 2, 2021 Leave a comment

One of the new feature that was announced in last week for Teams Rooms update was an option to directly cast your content from the mobile device without setting up a formal meeting. This is really beneficial when we need to share some thing directly from our mobile device to the participants in the meeting where we have a meeting room involved as a participant.

To start with utilizing this feature the Microsoft Teams App must be installed on your mobile , Bluetooth must be turned on , both the mobile device and the Teams Room system must be connected to the same network. At this moment the Teams Room must be running on Windows and must be within 10 meters range from the mobile device.

Its very easy to utilize all we need to to is open Teams App on the device – Go to the more option and click on Cast your screen

Once after we do that we are prompted with the below screen and all we need to do is just click on get started.

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Enable Modern Authentication on Microsoft Teams Room Devices

Microsoft Teams, Modern Authentication, Security May 23, 2021 Leave a comment

As we all know the basic authentication will be retired for Office 365 sooner and its high time for us to enforce Modern Authentication on all clients. When most of the organizations have already enabled Modern Authentication which is a good sign. However there are cases where the modern authentication cannot be interactive for the 2nd factor authentication ,needs some planning on those special cases and they have exceptions. For instance Room Systems they are having resource accounts with Teams Enabled and Exchange Online where these resource accounts cannot have modern authentication enabled with MFA like normal user accounts to approve for the 2nd factor authentication.

Post Microsoft Teams Room App version 4.4.25.0 we have the option to enable Modern Authentication on the devices capable of hosting Microsoft Teams Meeting. The account management of the Teams Room devices is set at the application level.

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Part3 – Setup the PSTN Trunk for the Direct Routing Configuration for Microsoft Teams

Direct Routing, Microsoft Teams March 11, 2021 Leave a comment

Continuing the previous article now we’ll go through the next steps that is required to complete the enterprise voice configuration. Now we have setup the AudioCodes SBC , configured SIP trunk from Office 365 to SBC the next step is to setup PSTN trunk from the SBC to the Telephony Provider.

If there is already an existing setup then this part is not required because the configuration will be already present in that case. In this article we will have a look at how to configure the PSTN Trunk for a new telephony provider.

There are multiple PSTN Sip Providers that we can use to complete this configuration. In our case we have chosen Telnyx as the PSTN Sip Provider for this demo purpose. They provide us the flexibility to purchase numbers as low as 10 USD and hence have chosen this for our testing.

Over here we are not going to deep dive much into Telnyx configuration since our task is to create a PSTN Trunk between them and our SBC. So we will go through only the steps that is required to complete the Direct Routing Configuration.

The moment when we subscribe with Telnyx they provide an advance credit of 10 USD and a portal like below. As per the Telnyx documentation we need to create a new SIP connection to our SBC in the below section where we could see they have a SIP connection with their backend system as a default setup.

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Upgrade the Surface Hub 2s from Windows 10 Team OS version RS2 (build 1703) to Windows 10 Team OS version 20H (build 2020) and Enable them for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams, Surface Hub February 26, 2021 Leave a comment

Microsoft Teams Room devices are a great way to have virtual meetings that provides us a amazing meeting experiences. This especially helps a lot in sharing content, collaborate easily and increases the work efficiency more subsequently by viably utilizing the Microsoft Teams Meetings. Surface Hub 2s have been a great fully integrated windows device capable of organizing the remote meetings, enhanced collaboration with the white board and provides great video quality with its astounding 4k camera.

So as per this article the Surface Hubs that are running Windows 10 Team OS version RS2 (build 1703) might reach end of support by March 16th 2021. So here we will go through the steps on how to update the Surface Hub 2s devices that are currently running Windows 10 Team OS version RS2 to Windows 10 Team OS 20H.

As per this article there are 3 options to achieve this via Windows Update, Windows Update for Business and Bare Metal Recovery.

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Script to move bulk users to Teams Only mode from On Premise Skype for Business Servers

Microsoft Teams, Powershell February 14, 2021 Comments: 21

When we enable Teams for Skype for Business Hybrid users the final stage of action is to move the actual on premise Skype for Business Account to Office 365 to make them to Teams only mode. As more organization are adopting the Microsoft Teams in a full fast track approach the last stage of migration is to move all the local accounts to Teams Only Mode.

This script will help in moving the users on batches to Teams Only Mode from an input csv file. It also provides the time taken to complete the batch on screen once the migration is completed.

Example below:

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Part 2 – Configure AudioCodes SBC for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing

Direct Routing, Microsoft Teams, SBC January 19, 2021 1 Comment

Continuing the previous article there are few more steps to complete the configuration of the Direct Routing with the office 365 tenant and in this article we will run through those steps.

Currently the SBC is up and running configured with the certificates and required SBC DNS records now the next step is to enable the direct routing. Well there are two options to enable the Direct Routing via skype online powershell session or via the Microsoft Teams Admin center. In our example we will try to enable them via the Teams admin center.

Before doing this make sure to meet the network prerequisite that is required for Direct Routing and have written an article about the same almost a year ago.

Login to the admin portal with the appropriate credentials.

Enter the DNS name of the SBC that was configured in our case its sbc.nl.exchangequery.com

Subsequently we must add all the required information over here. One important point to note over here is that the SIP signaling port that is present by default is port 5067. The Direct Routing SIP Trunk can be configured only by using a TLS connection. We can choose the SIP port any port of our choice. If we try to configure the port 5060 it will not work since the TCP connectivity is not supported due to security reasons.

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Part 1 – Configure AudioCodes SBC for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing

Direct Routing, Microsoft Teams January 7, 2021 1 Comment

Microsoft have been providing us the option bring your own sip trunk for enabling the enterprise voice functionality. With Microsoft Teams Direct Routing we can provide the phone system to Teams users ,connect the SIP Trunks and use the local telecommunications provider. This option provides most of the customers for an easy transition to Microsoft Teams in parallel by utilizing the existing infrastructure and moving the users to the new system.

In order to leverage this functionality we need to setup certified session border controllers. Previously there is an article written which can be referred to check the readiness and steps that is required to configure Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams.

In this article series we will see on setting up audiocodes session border controller that will help in configuring the Direct Routing.

There are multiple ways to achieve this and we have an option to configure this from the Azure Market place. We will see on configuring this from the Azure Market Place.

First prerequisite is we need a valid azure subscription. Login to Azure and search in the Azure Market Place for Audio Codes.

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Move users to Teams only mode from on premise Skype for business environment

Microsoft Teams, Office 365 December 18, 2020 Comments: 6

This article outlines the technical steps that is required to move an on premise skype for business account to Teams only mode. There are lot of other factors that needs to be considered before making this change and this step can only be a final stage almost in any environment.

If there is any PSTN integration with Skype for Business on-premise environment then these factors needs to be planned and executed in stages before phasing out Skype for Business On-premise and moving users to Teams Only Mode. These features and functionalities needs to be transferred completely to Microsoft Teams.

If you are moving from a Skype for Business 2015 environment, ensure that the supported CU version admin tools is Skype for Business Server 2015 with CU8.

In this example I have built a lab on my environment which has my local Directory identities below test accounts synched to the Azure AD.

And I have a standard Skype for Business 2015 environment running in the local active directory environment.

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