Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms

Executive boardrooms are where big decisions are made and important customer deals are won.

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.”

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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.

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