Bringing the Powers of Cisco to Microsoft Teams Rooms

In the spring of 2023, Cisco released support for Microsoft Teams Rooms for Cisco Collaboration devices. The unprecedented new collaboration between Cisco and Microsoft sent waves in the industry and the interest and pick-up of this capability over the last half year has been significant. A Microsoft Teams Rooms device from Cisco brings all the camera, audio, video, and hardware quality benefits to Microsoft Teams meetings. However, in the initial Microsoft Teams Rooms release, there were some limitations around use case that are extremely powerful and popular in the Cisco Devices userbase: Integrations and Customizations. This has now been addressed!

Dual register your Microsoft Teams Rooms devices

As a customer, you can dual register a Cisco Device for Microsoft Teams to Teams Admin Center (Microsoft) and to Cisco Webex Control Hub management platforms. The Control Hub registration will give customers several valuable benefits, such as advanced device management, usage, occupancy, and environmental sensor insights and ThousandEyes– and Meraki integration capabilities. Also, when connected to the Webex Cloud, customers and partners gain access to a powerful set of device and service APIs. These APIs are also available for Microsoft Teams Rooms devices. An example is an occupancy sensor event: Customers can now leverage the Cisco Device Sensor data while running Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Easily integrate with signage providers

In our November RoomOS release, we added the Signage capability to Microsoft Teams Rooms. This allows customers to utilize the Cisco devices for showing any web-based corporate messaging on the device screens when idle. The solution also allows integrations with signage providers like AppSpace and Cisco Spaces across deployment modes. Cisco is bridging the gaps between the Cisco Rooms experience and the Microsoft Teams experience, allowing customers to migrate in either direction without disrupting capabilities.

Customize the Microsoft Teams Rooms UI with Control Panel Extensions

In December, Cisco extended our customization capability even further. The introduction of Control Panel Extensions, allowed customers to add UI extensions to Cisco devices. UI extensions allow customization and enable a framework to trigger macros and expose panels on the device screens. The Control Panel is launched in the same way in the Microsoft Teams experience as in the Cisco Rooms experience, by a right-side left swipe. With UI extensions placed on the control panel, customers, integrators, and partners can build i.e. toggles, input fields, and slider panels with the same tools as for RoomOS customizations.

With a Microsoft Teams Rooms device for Cisco, the extension capabilities described here are automatically available when dual-registered to Control Hub.

In the upcoming releases of RoomOS, Cisco will extend our full range of customizations on the Microsoft Teams Rooms with on-screen notifications and web view content.