“In 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.

And just like any job candidate, a meeting room must now demonstrate its adaptability, technological proficiency, and ability to foster collaboration in a hybrid environment, says Marzynski, who’s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.

Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor—it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.

As is the case with most large companies, our shift to remote work happened suddenly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic, of course, upended the way the work world operates, thinks, and interacts. Its impact on our company culture, infrastructure, and processes has been long-lasting.

Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we’re deep into the era of hybrid work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform, we understand that remote participants are equally important and should be treated as such. When we work in a culture that emphasizes freedom of location, technology shouldn’t limit that choice.

Small shifts weren’t enough

At Microsoft, we’ve already made improvements to smaller rooms and executive boardrooms, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We’ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings and to promote collaboration. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.

If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front. The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Our biggest challenge yet has been creating a top-notch remote experience for our very large spaces. Picture the kind of venues that host all-staff meetings, events, and large-scale training sessions. Historically, such gatherings—those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online—haven’t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren’t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.

“If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,” says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.”

It’s difficult for presenters as well.

“Getting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn’t really happen well in these spaces,” Marzynski says.

Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren’t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.

Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That’s what The Hive is for—it’s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

Addressing the complexities of large hybrid gatherings

When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn’t do. A venue is not simply a scaled-up conference room because the dynamics of participation are different. Big, bold solutions were needed that required reexamining, reimagining, and redesigning both how Microsoft adapts existing tech and builds it fresh.

They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Unique challenges

Since 2020, Microsoft has been refreshing and retrofitting its 13,000-plus meeting rooms worldwide, equipping them with advanced new cameras, improved audio, and front-of-room screens. Of these, only around 400 are venues, or as we call them at Microsoft, multipurpose rooms. But, as Marzynski puts it, “They’re an important 400 to get right because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.”

As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.

Technological complexities

Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they’re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also ”re-interviewing” some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose. This common opportunity led to one of our team’s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren’t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.

“Even before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience because these big rooms are just very complicated,” Albert says. “They require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.”

Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.

“You might set it up differently depending on the event,” he says. “You might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.”

Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we said, ‘All right, what if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’ Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience’s relation to content, the remote and physical audience’s relationship with each other, and the presenter’s relationship with both groups

“Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, ‘What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’” Marzynski says. “Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’”

Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, “out in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, ‘Can we build a room around this? And does it have to be a specific room, or can it be kind of a range of spaces? Can it be flexible? Can it adapt? And importantly, ‘How much will it cost?’”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3efXIKjpA, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Balancing cost and scale

Imagine a venue: a spacious training room, or a group of modular rooms that can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in size. Because they’re large and designed for a high degree of flexibility, equipping such enormous spaces properly is expensive, mostly because of the custom technology required. They’re among the most expensive square footage that an office building can have, they cost a lot to operate, and they generate the highest percentage of service tickets in our AV estate.

The Hive’s success with hybrid-enabling and value-engineering smaller meeting rooms, and the positive feedback they received, buoyed their enthusiasm for their attempt to solve large spaces.

Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy. It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

The smaller conference rooms were one thing, but costs are higher for large venues with the extra technology needed to support them.

“Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy,” Albert says. “It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.”

Customer Zero: Iterating through feedback

To redesign venues, The Hive team used its lab to stress-test AI-driven presenter cameras, dedicated displays for remote attendees, a dedicated camera to capture the live audience, and enhanced Microsoft Teams features, among other tech.

After they had a working prototype, they were able to try it out internally with real events and get feedback via our Customer Zero program, in which we test and improve our own tech to help make our products better and more engaging. This allows us to offer our customers the best product we can.

“We brought our very rough early prototype into one of our all-hands meetings. It went reasonably well, Marzynski says. “It was a friendly audience, and we got some fantastic feedback.”

They put that feedback into action and prepared to show off new features at the following all-hands. It wasn’t quite smooth sailing.

“We did a dozen or so test events and many of them went well, but a couple were awful. We attempted to integrate some new technology into the older, existing AV and it just failed. Mic feedback, people couldn’t hear each other, that kind of stuff. Everyone was frustrated.”

But that’s all part of the innovation process.

“The feedback we received was blunt but actually encouraging. Our test users saw the potential and were cheering us on,” Marzynski says, “it was ‘Let’s keep making this better.’ So we kept testing it over and over again and it actually helped us make some important design choices.”

At every stage, the team sat down with their Microsoft Digital colleagues to refine their approach.

“We had workshops with our design teams,” Albert says. “We met with our research teams. We interviewed instructors and presenters who do Azure trainings every day. We talked to participants. That gave us a chance to really understand and dig deep into a lot of the challenges that are faced by people who are using these spaces.”

Designing for an equitable experience

The feedback from their Microsoft Digital colleagues underscored one unequivocal principle: Anything The Hive team developed had to be inclusive, equitable, and accessible to both in-person and remote employees.

Why?

Doing so creates an even playing field. It builds company culture. It’s empowering. It’s collaborative. It’s also good for business: When remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage to their in-person peers, everyone feels more invested in the discussion and outcomes.

They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored. The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Meetings that are natural and engaging help everyone feel like they’re in the same room.

“They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for hybrid meetings and workplace productivity at Microsoft Digital. “The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.”

It’s about making remote attendees feel fully included. “They can be avatars,” Sherry says. “They can be themselves. Whatever makes them comfortable.”

The important thing is that their cameras show them on the participant display.

“That reminds people in the room that many of the attendees are remote,” Sherry says. “It improves the experience for both, and remote employees are less likely to be forgotten.”

That said, there’s no doubt that the experiences will never be exactly the same for those in the room and those calling in remotely.

“There’s a certain energy that we’re not able to—or even trying to—replicate for remote participants,” Albert says. “We’re not trying to make it equal, really. We’re trying to make it the best it can be for each group.”

Taking advantage of internal and external insights

As Customer Zero, Microsoft provides The Hive with a fertile environment for a virtuous circle of improvements and feedback. The team has been working closely with different product groups to drive new features and priorities, which they pour back into subsequent improvements.

For example, The Hive team has partnered with our Continuous Learning team that, owing to its numerous trainings, are heavy users of larger venues.

And externally, they’ve involved a few trusted customers to help them get even more actionable feedback, adding to the iterative cycle.

“We have conversations with customers and event planners to try to make sure we’re not leaving any big holes in our experience and capabilities,” Albert says. “We’re now trying to cover all these different scenarios that we might not have been expecting when we were originally designing the space.”

The team anticipates getting a manufacturing partner involved and piloting a handful of solutions with different partners in the US, India, and Asia. The key going forward is making the tech for these large spaces modular by design, so they’re easier and quicker to install—and easier to support.

We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms. We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.

— Sam Albert, product manager, Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences, Microsoft Digital

Lessening the complexity is a key concern. Initially, installing the large venue solution that they built took 30 days and a lot of technical work. But working closely with the installers to streamline the process has cut that down to 2 days.

“We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms,” Albert says. “We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.”

We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced. A room that took four days to deploy can now be deployed in less than a day.

— Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Hybrid Meetings and Workplace Productivity team, Microsoft Digital

Our new large venue solution has had another major benefit—it has substantially reduced our operating costs. “In our pilot, we’re seeing our cost of deploying these large rooms go down by more than 50 percent,” Sherry says.

The reason is the new solution is so much simpler than the old one.

“We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced,” Sherry says. “A room that took 30 days to deploy can now be deployed in 2days.”

In addition, we anticipate that our total cost of ownership will go down over time because our room designs are easier to support and manage.

Building on success

As The Hive team continues to gather feedback and address the many complex aspects of creating hybrid capabilities in venues, they’re focused on solutions that please every participant, whether in person or remote, and keeping the barriers for entry, such as cost, as low as possible.

Their work has netted what they call “drop-in” solutions, which are less complex technology lifts that can be quickly deployed in existing spaces without a lot of infrastructure investment. Such spaces receive an upgraded technology kit that includes projectors and audience-framing cameras, among other goodies.

Albert reports that customers who have visited the demo at The Hive have shown great interest in piloting venue solutions in their own spaces. Working with the tech that The Hive team has created lowers the barriers that customers face in testing and discovering new solutions on their own and burnishes Microsoft Digital’s reputation as an IT innovation center.

Our work to reinvent our large multipurpose venues has just begun and will continue—so far these ultra important rooms are absolutely acing reinterviewing for their jobs.

Here are some tips on how you can improve your large meeting experience at your company:

• To meet your business needs in a hybrid world, rethink your employee experience across all digital capabilities and physical spaces.
• Historically, venue spaces haven’t given remote attendees an equal experience compared to those in the room physically, but doing so benefits all parties and is good for business: Hybrid multipurpose venues boost inclusivity, productivity, and accessibility for both in-person and remote attendees.
• Venues aren’t just scaled-up meeting rooms. The dynamics of large, hybrid events demand a different AV engineering approach.
• You positively impact your company culture when remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage compared to their in-person peers because everyone feels more invested in the discussion and the meeting’s outcomes.
• Companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.

Learn more about The Hive team and its approach to creating hybrid experiences.

• Learn how we’re designing a new hybrid meeting experience for everyone.
• See how we enable our employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack why businesses need to rethink their workspace experiences now.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Getting hybrid right: How we’re transforming large meetings at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When much of the world started working from home and many companies adopted a hybrid work model, we here at Microsoft began rethinking the way we meet and enable quality hybrid meeting experiences in all sizes and types of conference rooms.

When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, MSD

One of the most important meeting room scenarios that we tackled and knew we had to get exactly right, was the executive boardroom.

“When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization. “It’s got to be thought through from every angle—acoustics, aesthetics, etc.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8LdrWaank, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Here at Microsoft, our team in MSD worked with our partners in Global Workplace Services (GWS), our real estate organization, and the Microsoft Teams product group to build a new meeting room experience for executives that acknowledges the new post-pandemic world leaders are now working in.

“Every customer was being asked by their CEO, ‘What do we need to do to my boardroom so I can meet in it again,’” Hempey says. “They were telling their IT teams, ‘My old conference room is just not working for me now that I’m used to meeting on Teams. When I was working at home, we all worked on Teams and could see and hear each other. Now that I’ve gone back to the office, I can’t see or hear people who aren’t in the room, and they can’t see or hear people who are here in the room with me.’”

Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting. The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

A fix was needed, and quickly.

We used our on-campus meeting room laboratory, The Hive, to develop a solution, the Signature boardroom experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms, our Microsoft Teams meeting room product. The Signature boardroom experience is a combination of thoughtful physical design and ground-breaking use of technology. It helps meeting attendees feel connected to the meeting no matter where they join from.

The Signature boardroom experience is unique because of its high profile and its size.

“Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in MSD. “The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.”

We spent eight months getting the Signature boardroom experience “just right,” and first deployed it in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s conference room at the start of this calendar year. Now we’re gradually rolling it out to other executive meeting rooms as we’re able.

Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture. That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

The need for a Signature boardroom experience came from the way work changed after the pandemic.

“Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture,” says Greg Baribault, group product manager for Microsoft Teams and head of product for the team that builds Microsoft Teams meeting room systems. “That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.”

Getting technical

Bigger than our typical Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, the Signature boardroom experience is designed for 16 to 30 people. Its size and complexity required that we make a lot of decisions about what technology to put in the room and how it would work. Specifically, the team at the Hive worked closely with top audiovisual partners to evaluate, deploy and program the Microsoft Teams certified cameras, microphones, speakers and display technologies.

For example, bigger rooms also made it more important to make sure everyone can see the Teams meeting on the display, like shared content and the hand raise and chat panels from anywhere.

In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself. We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD

And just like in many executive boardrooms, there’s a wall of glass that brings in a lot of natural light, so another important design consideration in choosing a display technology that people can see even when it’s full daylight. “That’s how we landed on a large direct view LED video wall, and it’s only at 30 percent of its potential brightness,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive.

The video wall is an ultra-wide display and measures nearly 12 feet by 5 ½ feet and remote participants appear life-size, as if they’re sitting opposite the in-person participants. This is important because the boardroom experience must be equitable and inclusive for all participants, whether remote or in-person.

“In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself,” Marzynski says. “We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.”

That also leads to the unique table shape of our executive boardroom. The Boardroom archetype is ideally designed with a U-shaped table, open on one end to the front of room displays so the remote participants appear there. That said, the Signature boardroom experience is flexible and can support oval and rectangle tables as well, which is important because you can’t aways change out your tables, even for executive boardrooms.

“The circle of inclusion now includes the screen with remote participants at the same height as everybody sitting at the table,” Marzynski says. “It’s almost like they’re virtually in the room with you. Everybody is seated in a way that welcomes in these participants.”

All of the cameras in the room can pan, tilt, and zoom for a cinematic experience, similar to a multi-camera television show.

“The biggest piece of feedback we got from the old version of the room was that we could see everyone—except if they were standing in the front of the room presenting,” Hempey says. “Some in our senior leadership team are mostly remote, and seeing the face of the person standing at the front of the room is really important to their experience.”

The solution was several cameras, which work together with microphones in the ceiling to figure out who’s speaking, and then the appropriate camera can focus on that person.

“You can’t deploy just a single camera in a space of that size,” Albert says. “You need multiple cameras placed strategically around the room to get the best view of every seat at the table and presentation spaces.”

Reading the room

Reading the room is another challenge in a hybrid meeting, as you can’t always tell what body language people are displaying. If there was just one camera view, then you would only see the person who’s currently speaking. But with multiple cameras, one is assigned to provide a view of the room as a whole.

“There’s one camera dedicated to providing the context view, like picture-in-picture, overlaying a picture of the entire room over the people who are talking,” Marzynski says. “That way even if one or two people are talking, you have a chance of seeing how the rest of the room is reacting. And that is really, really powerful.”

You might think all these cameras would be an intrusive presence. And you’d have been right for an earlier iteration of the room, in which the cameras all “woke up” at the same time and created an unnerving feeling of being surveilled for in-person participants. However, the cameras are now much more unobtrusive, thanks to a lot of collaboration with GWS on finishes. The cameras are now in colors that match the ceiling and walls where they’re located, so they provide a great user experience without calling attention to themselves.

Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft. It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting room—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, MSD

The speakers are also top-of-the-line and were designed to support the new Teams Rooms spatial audio experience. The MSD team installed speakers in the front of the room and just below the video wall, additions complemented by existing overhead speakers. This array of speakers makes it so remote participants are heard as if their voice is coming from where they appear on the screen.

Despite the technological complexity of the boardroom, our team made sure its user experience is comparable with other Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft,” Hempey says. “It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.”

All that technology required a lot of collaboration with GWS. Their team helped with making sure the electrical outlets were powerful enough to support all the new components, including the cameras, microphones, and display. They also needed to make sure the HVAC system was strong enough to keep the room comfortable with the huge video wall emanating heat. In addition to that, they handled architecture, permitting, and defining standards for acoustics, lighting, table shapes, and furniture layouts.

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

“We didn’t start with the Microsoft boardroom,” Albert says. “We started with some functional mockups in found spaces. It was before the campus was fully opened, and we borrowed some spaces that were about the same size.”

After experimenting with those spaces, the MSD team found executives to “dogfood” the experimental room setup.

The work started at The Hive, our incubation space on Microsoft campus where life-size prototypes can be built and tested.

“One of the best things about The Hive is the ability to very rapidly prototype and fail fast on space design, the overall design of the experience,” Baribault says. “They [the MSD team] like to try a lot of different things, and there’s an experimentation process they go through. That’s a process you can go through in a space purpose-built for that. You can’t really do that in a high-end executive boardroom. The Hive’s been a tremendous asset for us the last few years as we’ve learned about hybrid work.”

It’s a place where we blend software with the physical world.

“We have this unique working area in The Hive that I like to call ‘phygital,’” Marzynski says. “Phygital is about delivering a digitally enhanced experience in a physical location—it’s where we combine meeting furniture, ambiance, and everything you feel in a meeting room with technology.”

The “phygital” concept is about using the power of software to avoid spending lots of money on physically rebuilding your meeting rooms.

“The technology adapts to the physical environment, not the other way around,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for MSD. “The technology is flexible enough to work within the constraints of the room to save time and cost, as the cameras can be configured to work with any existing furniture and fixtures.”

Getting to success

The hard, and sometimes nail-biting work of getting the Signature boardroom experience ready has been well worth the effort.

“It took our teams around 10 months to build, test, and iterate to create our Signature boardroom experience,” Sherry says. “We were able to take all our learnings from multiple buildouts and technology solutions and consolidate them in to one archetype that provides a roadmap for creating new hybrid boardrooms that work right out of the box.”

And it’s paying off—it now takes only six weeks to upgrade an executive meeting space. “It went live in February and now it’s been over half a year, and by all accounts it’s been really successful,” Marzynski says. “We got nice kudos from one of our leaders—he was bowled over by it and said, ‘This is awesome!’ It was a really nice feeling.”

We plan to make the specs for building the experience available to customers soon.

We have a replica of the boardroom in our Executive Briefing Center, and it’s very popular with customers who visit us there. Some have even asked for the parts list so they can recreate exactly what Microsoft has done with the boardroom.

“In this case, we shipped software, but we also shipped guidance on how to get started,” Baribault says. “It became a collaboration in not just solving our own problem but creating a solution to help our customers as well. That was a new thing for all of us and I hope it sets a new model for the company.”

In addition to being critical for high-level meetings, an important aspect of boardrooms in general is that they are very expensive, not just to build, but to operate.

“The cost of operating a boardroom is really significant to our customers, because these types of rooms often come with specialized support because of their complexity,” Sherry says. “You’re often not relying on the company’s AV and IT support—you have a white-glove service, and if something goes wrong you pick up the hotline, and they’re there.”

Still, AI reduces the operating costs, because a person isn’t needed to switch cameras manually and check sound levels. That can be done in software.

“We always think of the cost of building a room, but you end up paying a lot more to operate the room than you did to install it,” Sherry says. “And that’s important to our customers.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience:

• Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan your deployment. You need to consider your room size, layout, equipment, network, security, and licensing requirements. You can use the Meeting room guidance for Teams article to help you design and optimize your meeting spaces with Microsoft Teams Rooms solutions and devices.
• Get familiar with the features: Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. You can use the touchscreen console to join and manage meetings, share content, adjust audio and video settings, and more. You can also use voice commands to control the room with Cortana. You can learn more about the features and how to use them from the Microsoft Teams Rooms help & learning page.
• Configure and manage your devices: After you’ve deployed your Microsoft Teams Rooms devices, you need to configure and manage them to ensure they work properly and securely. You can use the Microsoft Teams admin center, PowerShell, or third-party tools to configure settings, update firmware, monitor device health, troubleshoot issues, and more. You can find detailed instructions on how to configure and manage your devices from the Microsoft Teams Rooms page.

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience.

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Unpack deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, generative AI at new Microsoft Canada headquarters.
• Explore why we’re buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.