{"id":12486,"date":"2024-08-06T16:57:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-06T23:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=12486"},"modified":"2024-10-28T13:54:53","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T20:54:53","slug":"buzzing-on-microsoft-teams-rooms-technology-internally-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/buzzing-on-microsoft-teams-rooms-technology-internally-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s been a lot of buzz around The Hive, our laboratory for building and testing new meeting room technology with Microsoft Teams Rooms.<\/p>\n
And for good reason\u2014The Hive is where we in Microsoft Digital (MSD), Microsoft\u2019s IT organization, create cutting-edge meeting experiences that get rolled into Microsoft Teams Rooms, our video conferencing product in Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n
Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft, and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers. What better way to show off what we\u2019re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, MSD team, The Hive<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Until recently, The Hive has been an internal-facing resource where we, with our partners in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group, experimented with ways to improve meeting experiences at Microsoft.<\/p>\n
However, as the work-from-home movement took off and customer interest in what we were doing in The Hive exploded, we made the decision to invite customers into our lab.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers,\u201d says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager on our MSD team at The Hive. \u201cWhat better way to show off what we\u2019re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.\u201d<\/p>\n
To this end, our team has built a new customer experience at The Hive that features live demonstrations that show customers how to visualize how Microsoft Teams Rooms function in different settings.<\/p>\n
Magic laboratory tours<\/h2>\n
Tours at The Hive are kind of like a meeting technology “speed dating” experience. Rather than just presenting a slide deck, we take a hands-on approach, spinning up a meeting (complete with realistic bot attendees) across a variety of spaces so customers can experience different room sizes, technologies, and scenarios in one walk through the facility. We can even invite their remote colleagues in for an additional point of view.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe bring customers into The Hive, tour them through, and demonstrate how Microsoft creates cutting-edge meeting experiences in hybrid work environments,\u201d Marzynski says. \u201cAnd then we share our processes and know-how to help them create their own inclusive hybrid work meeting experiences at their companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/a>
Take your own virtual tour of a Signature Teams Room at our Redmond, Washington, headquarters by selecting this image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The tours are so popular that interest far exceeds our team\u2019s capacity. In response, we\u2019ve launched a streaming series called \u201cThe Hive Live,\u201d where we invite account teams and customers for a live guided tour of our facility and a Q&A with our experts.<\/a> We\u2019ve also built virtual room tours<\/a>, where you can go online to see how actual Teams Rooms look and feel around our campuses. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like teleporting around a house you\u2019re interested in on a real estate site,\u201d Marzynski says.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Teams Rooms are represented as about a dozen different archetypes ranging from a Focus room for four people to an executive boardroom for over 30 people. These function as design references to inspire and unblock customers.<\/p>\n
\u201cInternally, we go super-deep with room specifications down to the last cable and screw required in the room,\u201d Marzynski says. \u201cWhile we do share those, it can be confusing when facing down a hybrid-work transformation challenge. Archetype thinking helps customers get out the weeds and imagine how to scale out a common room experience across a whole real estate portfolio.\u201d Ultimately, our team is focused on using The Hive to empower our customers to build their own experiences using Teams Rooms and other Microsoft technologies.<\/p>\n
Building innovative hybrid meeting experiences<\/h2>\n
Interacting with external customers at The Hive has allowed us to more deeply understand our customers and their pain points. Understandably, we learned that customers want to create a welcoming, inclusive hybrid work environment while controlling costs.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Teams Rooms have different archetypes to fit with the various needs of our employees and each room is optimized for its audience and use case.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n We\u2019re not just working with expensive, experimental, showy new technologies at The Hive. We have three points of view through which we evaluate our work there: Capability, collaboration, and cost.<\/p>\n
Capability refers to what people can accomplish in a meeting space with the right technology. Collaboration alludes to how we take advantage of moments that matter to make collective effort in meetings as seamless and productive as possible, and cost translates as ensuring that we\u2019re driving value and recommending the most durable investments in hybrid work experiences.<\/p>\n
With these central ideas in mind, The Hive created an entirely reimagined meeting room that we\u2019re now using across the company\u2014the Signature Teams Room.<\/p>\n
Signature is the most evolved embodiment of Microsoft Teams Rooms. It\u2019s designed to provide a fully inclusive and collaborative meeting experience for all attendees, whether they\u2019re joining remotely or in-person. It includes specialized furniture, displays, cameras, and audio devices that are arranged in a way that makes it easier for all attendees to engage with each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s where the engineering of the technology and the design of the furniture and physical environment are fully integrated to create the most hybrid-friendly, inclusive experience possible,\u201d Marzynski says.<\/p>\n
One of the key features of a Signature Teams Room is a relocated central focal point for meeting attendees.<\/p>\n
In a traditionally laid-out meeting room, the focal point of the meeting tends to be the center of a table, as it has been since meetings were invented. Remote participants tend to be off to the side of the room on a monitor, away from this focal point.<\/p>\n
\u201cRemote attendees can feel like observers, rather than participants, in a poorly thought-out traditional design,\u201d Marzynski says. \u201cYou\u2019re looking through what feels like a security camera, at a room of people that are sitting around a table, often facing away from you. And the in-room experience suffers as well, since everyone is forced to pay a cognitive tax to simultaneously balance two different types of interactions in two different parts of the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
By altering the room\u2019s layout and selecting complementing hardware, Signature Teams Rooms have what is called a “circle of inclusion,” which welcomes in remote attendees and places them at natural eye gaze points. The result is that hybrid meetings feel more organic than in a traditionally designed room, like sitting around a half-digital, half-physical conversation circle.<\/p>\n
Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable. Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Margie Strite, product marketing manager, Microsoft Teams<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
All Signature Teams Rooms have the following properties:<\/p>\n
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- In-person and remote attendees face each other<\/li>\n
- Camera is at eye level<\/li>\n
- Spatial audio can match a person\u2019s voice to their location<\/li>\n
- Remote participants have a clear view of everyone in the room<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
These seemingly small changes have a huge impact on how meetings are experienced.<\/p>\n
Our solutions are very individualized. Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, MSD Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cChanges, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable,\u201d says Margie Strite, a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. \u201cEmployees are more likely to feel included and valued.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other small shifts, such as including a content camera aimed at an analog whiteboard for meetings or including digital collaboration devices like the Surface Hub, offer ways to increase engagement between in-person and remote participants. The exact methods used and specifications for each Signature Teams Room built can vary for each customer and are based on their unique scenarios.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur solutions are very individualized,\u201d says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the MSD Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team at The Hive. \u201cSignature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.\u201d<\/p>\n
At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible. We\u2019re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes – while driving down cost and complexity.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Sam Albert, principal product manager at The Hive<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Hive also concentrates on resourcefulness, deploying meeting rooms that provide excellent hybrid meeting experiences while limiting costs.<\/p>\n
Reducing costs while upgrading meeting rooms<\/h2>\n
The reduction of cost is vital when building a new meeting room experience can cost as much as building a new house.<\/p>\n
While some organizations might be comfortable spending large amounts of their budget to update and improve meeting rooms, many want to strike a balance between experience and cost-efficiency. This is largely why The Hive focuses on creating individualized solutions with its Signature Teams Rooms. Most of the time, a lot of energy is put into making the most of what already exists within a room, rather than remodeling everything. There are also new, modular solutions being built within Microsoft.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible,\u201d says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive. \u201cWe\u2019re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes\u2014while driving down cost and complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new low-cost, modular approach to deploying room solutions that our experts designed at The Hive bypasses the usual built-in technology and keeps costs down, even when the technology needs to be updated in the future.<\/p>\n
We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented. We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Danielle Chelles-Blair, senior designer, MSD<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
For example, in a large multi-purpose room, this solution features a mobile pod that works with Microsoft Teams Rooms and is equipped with audience-facing cameras, a presenter-tracking camera, and scalable audio. During a meeting room refresh at Microsoft, this modular solution helped cut our cost by 75 percent as compared to how we would traditionally upgrade the same meeting room.<\/p>\n
Despite being more cost-effective and less intensive than traditional solutions, the modular solution is still designed to create inclusive hybrid meeting experiences.<\/p>\n
Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs. The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Margie Strite, product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cWe designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented,\u201d says Danielle Chelles-Blair, a senior designer in MSD. \u201cWe wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Microsoft employees Matt Hempey, Matthew Marzynski, Margie Strite, Sam Albert, and Danielle Chelles-Blair all work to build more engaging meeting experiences at The Hive, Microsoft\u2019s meeting space laboratory.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n In addition to inclusivity and cost-savings, for many organizations, the reduced trial-and-error to find effective meeting experience solutions is a marked benefit of turning to The Hive.<\/p>\n
\u201cCustomers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs,\u201d Strite says. \u201cThe experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Go here to see and virtually experience a Signature Teams Room for yourself.<\/a><\/p>\n
To sign up for an upcoming Hive Live session, browse our topics and register here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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If you\u2019re thinking about getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms, here are some tips to help you get started:<\/p>\n
\n
- Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it\u2019s important to plan your deployment. This includes identifying the rooms where you want to deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms, selecting the right hardware, and ensuring that your network infrastructure is ready for video conferencing.<\/li>\n
- 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. Some of these features include one-touch join, proximity detection, and content sharing. It\u2019s important to get familiar with these features so that you can use them effectively during your meetings.<\/li>\n
- Ensure that your devices are up-to-date: To ensure that you have the best possible experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms, it\u2019s important to keep your devices up to date. This includes updating the firmware on your cameras, displays, and audio devices.<\/li>\n
- Train your users: Finally, it\u2019s important to train your users on how to use Microsoft Teams Rooms effectively. This includes teaching them how to join meetings, how to share content, and how to troubleshoot common issues.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.<\/a><\/p>\n
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- Read more about signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms.<\/a><\/li>\n
- Discover crafting a new hybrid meeting room experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.<\/a><\/li>\n
- Explore deploying signature Microsoft Teams Rooms with generative AI.<\/a><\/li>\n
- Unpack how Microsoft internally deploys signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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