January 17, 2025 • 30 mins
Welcome to Episode 393 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben is joined on the show by Alex Mooney from Logitech. The two of them discuss the integration of technology into meetings. They start out discussion AI for transcribing in-person meetings, highlighting some of their benefits and then shift into discussion various meeting room systems for Microsoft Teams. They discuss some of the offerings from Logitech including the Rally Bar Huddle, Rally Bar Mini, and Rally Bar and how they are certified for both Android and Windows to work in different scenarios for building out your Microsoft Teams Room system.
Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options.
Show Notes
Microsoft Teams Room
Microsoft Teams Room Documentation
Plan Microsoft Teams Rooms
Microsoft Teams Room Devices
Logitech
Conference Room Systems
Request Logitech Demo
About Alex
With a leadership role at Logitech, Alex has had the exciting opportunity to shape the future of digital workspaces. He's directed major collaborations, including the impactful partnership between Logitech and Microsoft that's driving billions in revenue. These aren't just business deals, they're transformations—helping companies worldwide navigate the ever-changing terrain of technology.
Creating and implementing innovative solutions is part of Alex's DNA. Project Ghost, an immersive video conferencing experience, is just one of the many successful initiatives that he's been proud to lead.
He's often invited to share my insights on industry trends and strategies at key events and in publications. It's a role he relishes — helping others grasp the opportunities that this rapid era of technological change brings. His focus is always forward, on the potential of what can be achieved together in the fields of collaboration and efficiency.
Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexm00ney/
About the sponsors
Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to episode
393
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded
live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss a topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode, Ben is joined on the
(00:24):
show by Alex Mooney from Logitech.
The 2 of them discuss the integration of
technology into meetings. They start out the discussion
by talking about AI for transcribing in person
meetings, highlighting some of their benefits. And then
from there, shift into discussion around various meeting
room systems for Microsoft Teams. They discuss some
of the offerings from Logitech, including the Rally
(00:45):
Bar Huddle, Rally Bar Mini, and Rally Bar,
and how they are certified for both Microsoft
Teams on Android and Windows in order to
work in different scenarios for building out your
Microsoft Teams room systems.
So we're sitting here at Ignite, another
interview.
So it's been a good show. It's day
(01:05):
what day is it? Day 2 or 3
now? 2? 3. I I think day 3?
Messed up with Monday. It's Thursday. It is
day 3. Yes. So I'm sitting here with
Alex from Logitech. So we're gonna talk, like,
Teams, Teams Room Devices, Teams Premium,
maybe some Copilot because that's what everybody talks
about at Ignite.
Copilot. Copilot. Copilot. Yeah. Exactly. So I need
(01:28):
to go ahead and introduce yourself, Alex. Tell
us a little bit about you, what you
do, all that. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. So I'm
Alex Mooney. I work at Logitech in our
alliances group, which is basically just means that
I get to do all the fun stuff
of managing our partnership
with Microsoft.
So
product development,
certifications,
(01:48):
everything in that kind of realm, and then
how we deliver
these products to our customers.
Okay. Very cool. So you're gonna tell us
all the stuff that Logitech's working on. Right?
Yeah. All the things. All the things. Excuse
me. This podcast, to listen to this episode,
you have to sign the NDA. No.
So I'm curious, Alex. Like, I know we
were talking a little bit about some of
the devices, and we'll probably get into that
(02:10):
a little bit later. But more from, like,
a
Windows devices. You guys do a bunch. Like,
I've used Logitech devices forever. You have mice.
You have keyboards. You have meeting room devices.
You have headsets.
So with that, I'm you see a lot
of different aspects of more how people are
working, whether it's working on Windows with peripherals,
(02:30):
Teams meetings.
Like, what have you I guess, maybe even
how have you seen the industry change, or
how are do you see people
working
recently
as they incorporate your devices into their day
to day workflow?
Yeah. It's fine. Logitech,
I guess, for the last 40 years, we
(02:51):
have been creating peripherals
to try to create human interaction with software
and tools,
produced by Microsoft and others. And so whether
it's a keyboard, a mouse, a webcam, a
headset, we've been in this space for a
long time. We only just recently
in the last, I'd say, 12 years, got
into
doing meeting room technology. Okay. And just in
(03:13):
that time, we've been able to kind of
skyrocket
into now the number one position
as an OEM creating Microsoft Teams Rooms, but
more more largely
market share wise with just creation of video
conferencing products around the world. And I think
the reason why is because
during that time frame, people's requirements shifted from
(03:35):
these massive codecs
that were complicated,
$200,000
rooms plus,
and we just wanted to make video
and audio
ubiquitous across all the rooms. We wanted to
make it available to all the users in
the organization. So we took the approach of
saying, hey. We're gonna use USB. We're gonna
use open standards. No one was doing it.
People looked at us like we were crazy.
(03:56):
Why is Logitech making a camera? Don't do
that. But it's fun. And I think that's
why we saw this kind of seismic shift.
After 2020,
we we already knew everyone's gonna go work
from home. Everyone's gonna be remote, and everyone's
gonna need ways to connect
whether it's with super high quality audio or
video or other things. They're gonna need ways
(04:16):
to connect with their coworkers
and to keep their workflows
going. So we already knew that, but it
just accelerated all these trends. It brought them
in 8, 10 10 years in terms of
the adoption.
So I think right now, we're all experiencing
the back end of that. Like, it's just
everyone does video. If I get through a
single day without saying, I'm you're on mute,
(04:38):
it's it's a it's a good day. But,
yeah, that's where we are. And I think
there's a there's a big trend right now
within Microsoft Teams Rooms. So saying, do I
want to have rooms deployed on Windows or
on Android? That's a hot topic right now.
I think looking deeper into the management stacks
is a hot topic. What size of room
should we deploy? Maybe we don't need so
(04:58):
many boardrooms. We can do, like, Huddl rooms,
things like that. So there's a lot of
those questions out. BYOD,
how does AI fit into this ecosystem? Like,
Copilot is everywhere, but Yep. Okay. But how
do I incorporate that into my meeting practice?
I think that's the trend of where we're
seeing everyone go. Okay. So what kind of
trends have you seen? We'll just dive right
into meetings because that one's a popular one
(05:20):
with Copilot.
Right? Is Yeah. Copilot, Teams Premium,
meeting transcriptions, what kind of trends have you
seen
from the AI space,
Copilot,
as well
as meetings,
meeting rooms
Yeah. That type of space? So the I
think one of the most compelling use cases
(05:40):
early on
for Copilot is the meeting summaries
and so forth. Because just in terms of
early adoption, like, I haven't quite figured out
how to incorporate
Copilot into my mainstream workflows in Office and
PowerPoint, so forth. Outlook, this is obvious. Help
me rephrase this this email, summarize what I'm
reading, so forth like that. Yep. These are
(06:01):
very early stage adoptions. So they're easy for
users to wrap their minds around. But one
of the most immediate places where you get
the benefit of the time saving is actually
in the meeting room. So it's, I joined
late, catch me up, or I didn't join
the meeting at all, give me the summary
and and so forth. What were the action
items?
Can we make some notes? These kinds of
(06:22):
things. That I think has been really, really
cool. One thing that we've been trying to
really focus on is, okay, this is great.
We have this amazing technology from Microsoft.
How do we help users get the most
out of that? And it actually starts with
super high quality audio capture. So the more
that we can work with our customers to
make sure that the audio is pristine,
that means that the transcript is accurate. And
(06:44):
when you have an accurate transcript, Copilot gives
you accurate insights. So it starts all the
way back with some of our just basic
AV principles, and then making sure that these
things are happening. So trend wise, I think
that we're seeing a lot of
people trying to look into, do I wanna
turn in turn
on recognition?
Okay. Speaker recognition and so forth, which is
(07:07):
where the in Teams room, the Teams room
will actually identify the various users sitting around
the table. So since Alex is saying this,
Ben's saying that Yep. Versus it's just Teams
user, Teams user.
Right. That's an important one. It takes a
lot of data data governance. Like, how do
I want to, you know, update my privacy
policies to allow this? There's a a moment
(07:28):
there that you have to make some key
decisions as an organization. But I think fundamentally,
just let's make sure that we have really,
really, really good audio. Well and that's an
interesting one because
people
have known that
going back in other technologies. Like, you look
at business intelligence. Right? That's been around for
a while now. And I remember when business
(07:49):
intelligence was first catching on, that was a
big thing as people were like, well, if
I put garbage data into business intelligence,
I'm not gonna get the reports, the metrics
out of it that
maybe I'm looking for. And now it sounds
like you've seen the same thing as for
a long time, and I would say even
today, I get in a lot of meetings,
(08:09):
and people don't necessarily
care about their audio. They're using, like, their
laptop speaker with the lid closed in a
clamshell then.
That audio quality isn't
necessarily
there, and that's not something that I know
I don't know that I've necessarily thought about
that either is, what if you want good
transcripts, you want good summaries, really focusing on
(08:32):
the input. The AI model can only do
so much based on the quality of data
going into it. And some of it's user
training. Don't talk over each other in a
meeting because then the transcription
has a hard time keeping up with who's
saying what in the meeting room. So some
of it is just user behavioral training, but
also,
a lot of it is, yeah, you just
(08:52):
need to know what the person said.
And not everyone speaks as loud. Some people
speak softer. There's all sorts of different ranges
of vocal qualities and so forth. And so
making sure that you have a super high
quality audio pickup for every seat in the
room is a critical component to getting the
most out of the AI investment because otherwise,
(09:12):
you're gonna miss somebody's valuable input. And if
you've missed just one voice out of 10
at a meeting room, well, your transcription is
now not accurate. So all the insights you
gain are actually missing the full picture. So
I think that's a a key element. We're
trying really hard to make sure we're doing
this. So we've got this thing called right
site 2. Okay. Right sound 2. Okay. This
(09:33):
is our AI built into our meeting room
technology
that improves the, auto framing for site. So
the visuals Oh, interesting. Okay.
And the audio performance for right sound. And
so it's really cool. We're doing a lot
of AI algorithms to remove
unwanted sounds, typing,
bag crinkling, like potato chips or whatever. How
(09:54):
about somebody eating an apple? That's what I'm
on. I'm like, I can have meetings and
somebody's like, chomps into an apple, and I'm
like, okay. Come on. Really?
Right by the mic pod too. It's always.
Exactly.
Yeah. So so we are looking for voices,
and then we're looking for commonly unwanted sounds.
So it's a little more than just like
a basic noise reduction, which is like an
(10:15):
audio gating. So it's a lot smarter than
that. And we're removing unwanted sounds, and then
making sure that every voice in the room
is auto leveled. Got it. Quiet speakers, loud
speakers, all come across at approximately the same
volume. And that come coupled with obviously things
like echo cancellation, reverberation
reduction, just to make sure you get a
really nice clean capture. Right. It makes a
(10:37):
a really nice front end audio experience. Much
better than what people might hear on this
given the environment we're sitting in and that
we're not recording this with, that type of
stuff. But On on a trade show floor.
Right. On a trade show floor. Fortunately, for
this, we get the post processing, where a
lot of meetings, you're not you don't have
the advantage of post post processing the audio.
So it's doing, like, real time
(10:59):
AI audio
processing
of all these different voices. Yeah. We jokingly
say we want video
to be better than being there. So we
we want the remote experience to be better
than the in person experience. Now this is
obviously an ambitious
concept. But the point is is that if
you were, like, say, watching a sporting event,
you're watching and
(11:20):
every camera that you saw on the screen
was just the headshot of the person running
around, you miss all the context. It's like,
okay. This is cool. I can see everyone's
face, but I don't actually know what's going
on. Yeah. So what you really want is
someone to intelligently switch the camera views for
you so you always see the action. And
when you're listening to the audio, you don't
wanna listen to everything. You really want something
(11:41):
to curate the audio and make sure that
it's really, really clean. All the noises are
removed. So that's what we're trying to bake
in with AI into all of our products.
That's where Right Sight and Right Sound come
in. Right Sight with things like Logitech Sight
in the center of table doing smart switching.
It does this cool thing where it takes
all the camera lenses in the room, and
then it intelligently switches the view of you
(12:03):
in the gallery based on your head position.
So if you turn your head and you
look at the front of room and you're
addressing the far end user, they see you
looking at them. But if I then turn
across the table to talk to someone that's
collaborating in the room, we'll switch the view
to the center of table camera, see all
the remote experience, you always see the person's
face. Got it. So you're able to we'll
(12:24):
move around this around a minute with your
products. You're able to put multiple
cameras in the room. So if you have,
like, the camera under the screen in the
front, but then a camera on the table
or cameras placed around the room, they can
all work together
Yeah. To really intelligently
give you the best. You get, like, an
automated an AI cameraman
Exactly. In the room. Exactly. Yeah. So let's
(12:46):
use an example of a rally bar. It's
a really common all in one video bar.
We would put that under the display. It's
got speakers,
microphones, and the camera all built into it.
And it's 22 lenses, 2 cameras on board,
a wide angle camera, and then one that
can zoom in and focus.
So when you have 2 there, that's great.
You're gonna cover this big room. But what
if my room is say 15 seats on
(13:08):
a really long table, like a bowling alley?
Yep. The lens can only see from the
front of the table. So if somebody leans
forward, they're blocking all the people behind them.
Right. You can't see them. And so what
we really want is to add additional cameras
down the table. That's where Logitech site comes
in. Okay. So now you have this center
of table camera. It can see everyone around
the table's faces and you have the front
(13:28):
of room, but now you need something to
intelligently direct and and switch which camera view
is being shown so the foreign user doesn't
have to do it themselves. And that's where
the AI comes in. We compare all the
views of Ben in the gallery, and we
say, this is the best picture. Ben, show
that to the foreign user. We don't want
the one that's looking in his ear as
he turns and okay. Yeah.
(13:52):
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected
issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is
here to help. Much like you take your
car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge
on how to best keep your car running,
Intelligent helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment
because that's their expertise.
Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates in
(14:14):
the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether
you are a small organization with just a
few users up to an organization of several
1000 employees, they want to partner with you
to implement and administer your Microsoft Cloud technology.
Visit them at inteliginc.com/podcast.
That's
(14:36):
intelligink.com/podcast
for more information or to schedule a 30
minute call to get started with them today.
Remember, Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so
you focus on your business.
So another thing you mentioned earlier was
(14:56):
Teams Room on Android
and Teams Room on Windows. And I know
this is something that we were talking about,
the actually, the other day. I was here
asking you some questions about it because sometimes
the functionality
differs between
those two platforms. There's pros and cons probably
to each one. What are some of those
things that you've seen
(15:17):
in helping people pick between,
maybe I'm okay with Teams Room on Android
or I want Teams Rooms on Android,
versus
when should I maybe start thinking about Teams
Room on Windows
because of how those 2 kinda compare or
contrast or have different advantages
and such? This is a question that we
get from customers all the time that are
(15:39):
people that are just trying to figure out,
I've gotta manage a 1,000 rooms. Which management
ecosystem do I want? I think that's really
what it boils down to, Windows versus Android.
It comes down to the management ecosystem. Okay.
And some of the feature discrepancies between the
two platforms. Microsoft did a a nice article
not too long ago that kind of shared
their position on where the feature development happens
(15:59):
and so forth. So I think people know
Windows is gonna be the platform you want
to use for your Microsoft Teams room if
you're gonna use things like AI and so
forth like that. If you want intelligent speaker
recognition where you would have, say, a rally
bar in the room, but as different users
in the room speak, it identifies them as
their name instead of just So, like, conference
(16:21):
room 1 or yeah. Yeah. You're gonna get
those features on Windows first. This is where
a lot of the development happens. Android is
super simple to deploy and manage. It's built
into the bars, and so you don't have
a separate PC to manage. So a lot
of companies that are coming out of environments
where they're used to managing, they have their
own AVVLANs
(16:41):
and so forth. They're used to the appliance
Yeah. Model of an AV component. They like
the Android experience because it's just easy, simple
device,
all in one. Attach my license, and I'm
good to go. So it fundamentally just comes
down to where does your particular capabilities and
your team lie? Where what are you more
comfortable managing? Windows PCs or Android devices?
(17:04):
And then from there, what are the specific
needs in each room that you may need?
If you want all the AI, go with
Windows. If you like simplicity for maybe smaller
spaces and stuff, Android's a great option for
that. Logitech
doesn't necessarily
want to tell our users which ones they
need to use because it's it's a very
unique decision for every organization. Everybody's needs are
(17:25):
different. And so what we do, which I
think we do uniquely amongst OEMs, is we
dual certify all of our products for both
Windows and Android. So that same rally bar
that has Android built in Yep. You plug
it in with a USB to a PC,
and now it's a certified Teams Rooms on
Windows device as well. So you have that
kind of option. Got it. And this is
(17:46):
what you had to explain this to me
like a few times. I was trying to
wrap my head around it the other day,
where like, Teams Room on Android is technically
running on the devices. So if you pick
up a Logitech device, one of the Teams
Room devices, put it on the wall, hang
it on the TV, plug it into a
network cable, you can be up and going,
running,
we'll say that quickly. There's the licensing and
(18:07):
stuff to think about as well, but then
you're gonna be running Teams Room on Android.
Right. Because Android is what the OS built
into all your operating systems. And if you
want Teams Room on Windows, you do need
to have another device,
some PC device, mini PC,
full blown computer.
I'm assuming people pulling a laptop into the
room and plugging it in, any of those,
(18:29):
and then it just automatically switches to Teams
Room on Windows?
Yes. There's 3 categories.
We'll say it's BYOD,
meaning I brought my laptop in, I plug
it into the room, and my laptop hosts
the meeting. Okay. The second category is I
have a native Teams room. It's got a
Teams room pro license attached,
and I've made the decision to go with
(18:51):
Teams rooms on Android for the management ecosystem.
In which case, the compute that's that's hosting
the meeting is actually built into the bar
on a chipset that's already integrated into the
bar. And that's the one running Android Right.
For everything. And then there's Teams Rooms on
Windows. If you chose to have a native
Teams Room but running on a Windows PC,
you have the Windows PC in the room
connected to the bar, and the Windows PC
(19:12):
is the one that's hosting the call and
providing those streams back to Microsoft in the
cloud. So it really just depends on where
does the Teams client that's hosting the call
live. Got it. Do you dare get into
licensing? Like, do you talk about licensing when
it comes? Because I know that's another topic.
I have some Teams Room devices at home.
I won't say which ones because they're a
(19:33):
competitor.
We can fix that. We can fix that?
Okay. Good to hear. And then I can
get some experience with those. But I know
some of the licensing has changed to around
Teams Room devices and how
you think about even
which licenses
you may want, how you license devices when
it comes to Teams Room and Microsoft 365.
(19:53):
Is that something you get into or talk
about much, or do you leave that up
to You know it. People? It's really up
to the organization where they are, and every
group is a little bit different because of
where they are in the enterprise agreement with
Microsoft. So there's actually a large number of
people that still have Teams Room standard licenses
or Teams Room premium licenses on their tenant.
(20:16):
Okay. Everyone is moving to either a Teams
Room basic license or a Teams Room pro
license. The pro license has a cost associated
with it. The basic license is free. Okay.
So if you were to take a Logitech
device, like the RallyBar out of the box,
plug it in Yep. And you need to
assign a license, you can assign
the Microsoft Teams Room basic license, which is
(20:36):
free to that device, and you're up and
running with the Teams Room. Okay. There are
simply some limitations. You can only have so
many Teams Room basic licenses
on your tenant, and then then you're there's
just no more available.
And the basic license has a few restrictions
from feature sets, like, dual monitor and AI
capabilities and so forth. So really, it comes
down to I think for most users, they're
(20:59):
gonna be migrating into Teams Room Pro,
licenses anyway, which actually is the right decision
to make because it gives you access to
the pro portal, which has some really great
automatic remediation capabilities
and some really good insights for tracking the
health of devices. You can go in and
see which rooms are the most stable versus
the least, and it gives you a lot
of insights as to which devices should I
(21:21):
deploy, which ones are being most utilized. So
if I have to change my floor plan
around, I know which room sizes are the
most commonly used and so forth like that.
So I think for most users, probably over
the course of the next few months, they're
just gonna be either on a basic or
a pro license. Okay. And that's one thing
I noticed too. I think with pro, I
come from the admin side of it is
(21:43):
I found that I needed Pro, like, if
I wanna manage the devices with Intune as
well. Bring them to the portal, I think,
and doing all the device management. And I'm
trying to remember if you even, like, updates,
being able to manage updates on these devices
from Intune, it was
all go by that pro license. Yeah. If
you want to have the benefit of that
meaningful,
(22:04):
serious management ecosystem,
which is really fantastic that Microsoft
has developed for these these devices,
The pro management portal is the right place
to do that. Okay. And so from there,
in order to get that, you need a
pro license. Yep. So it is the right
decision to make for organizations,
I think, if you have, you know, greater
than 20, 25 rooms. Okay. One other question,
(22:25):
maybe we'll wrap up with this one is
you had mentioned,
like, having these devices, having your conference rooms,
being able to recognize
individual people in the room where you can
and you have 10 people in, and as
you're generating
the transcript, if you're doing the AI summary
and you want names associated with people, being
able to recognize
all of the people in the room as
(22:45):
themselves
versus
it's just the conference room, and it could
have been any one of the people. What
type of process
is that to go through in order to
get that set up and configured? Because I'm
guessing you can't just have 10 people come
into the room, and it's like, oh, I
know who that is. I mean, there's a
lot of information about us on the Internet,
(23:05):
but not that much, I hope. This is
not big brother. We're not using some some
big facial recognition, scrubbing your social media. No.
It's just none of that. So it's actually
really simple. As the tenant, as the admin,
you have to go in and opt in
for your organization to have speaker recognition
enabled for your users. What that's using is
Microsoft's biometric.
(23:26):
And so, basically, once you opt in as
an organization,
all the users have the option to go
into their Teams client, go into the settings
right there from their their desktop Okay. Their
Teams client, go into the settings and enable
recognition, and then enroll their voice and face.
So it's a 2 step process. Admin enables,
and once they enable, the users have the
ability to self enroll. Okay. If they've self
(23:48):
enrolled, what happens when they walk into a
Teams room is the that Teams on the
cloud is going to get their voice
and their face, and it's going to compare
it to the enrolled users and then identify
their name in the transcript. So then in
the participants in a Teams call, instead of
just seeing
ignite meeting room 1, it'll say ignite meeting
(24:08):
room 1, and then under it, it'll say,
Ben and Alex. And every time you speak,
it'll show in the transcript that Ben said
this, and when I speak, Alex said this,
instead of just being meeting room 1 said
all of it. Okay. And then what happens,
let's say because, again, you said it relies
on users enrolling themselves. Yes. If you get
10 people, ten's a nice round number, 5
(24:30):
people enrolled
and 5 people haven't enrolled,
do you get then a mix of individual
users, then you still end up with Ignite
conference room 1 that's the other 10? So
the the enrollment only applies to people in
meeting rooms because if you're logged in through
your own account, maybe you're a remote user,
you're already identified. So your identity is already
in the call. So for those users in
(24:52):
the meeting room, if half of them have
enrolled, they'll all be identified and the other
half will not. So it'll say, for example,
unidentified user
1, 2, 3, 4, 4. Doesn't lump them
all into just the conference room. It still
picks out individual users Right. But they're just
generic
Yeah. User 1, user 2. Unnamed user. Yeah.
Okay. And you do have the option to
(25:13):
go back and add the name manually if
you don't use the biometric to self to
identify it for automatically.
You can go in and manually change the
name from unnamed user 1 to Ben said
Right. If you can pick up who said
what or have everybody, like, come in and
introduce yourselves for the for Copilot. Right? Hi.
I'm Ben.
(25:33):
Very cool. So diving into you mentioned a
few of your products too along along the
way here. I There was the Play Bars,
the
I know you have, like, some different headsets.
Yeah. Are there
recommendations
that you would have for users
or companies
looking to maybe start investing in a Teams
(25:54):
room or if there's and I know it's
gonna depend too based on size of the
conference room, based on size of the company
where maybe devices of, like, people getting started
versus people that have massive conference rooms or
just how would they start getting introduced
to rolling out one of these Teams Room
systems or recommendations from that Logitech product line?
(26:14):
Yeah. A super easy tool would be to
go on to logitech.com/microsoft/trial.
And you can fill out a form there,
and that will send me Okay. Along with
the rest of a large team, a message
that says that you would like to sample
some of these products. You'd like to demo
them. And we do offer up to 2
room systems free for you to put into
(26:35):
your your environment. They're yours to keep. And
then you can get Teams Rooms set up
and going, and you can see how these
these products work in your own environment. And
you can feel, experience the benefit of them.
So that's a great starting place. If we
try to make it really simple, our portfolio
is RallyBar Huddle, RallyBar Mini, and RallyBar.
So Huddle is what it sounds like. So
(26:56):
2, 3, 4, 5 people in a small
to Huddle space. Okay. RallyBar Mini is the
small to medium room, and then Rally Bar
is the medium to large room. Got it.
We just try to make it as easy
as possible to pick the one that's the
right for you right one for you. All
of them are dual certified for both Android
and Windows.
All of them natively work with Microsoft Teams
(27:17):
Rooms right out of the box, and all
of them obviously have the certification
and the full support and warranty and everything
from Logitech and from Microsoft. Okay. Awesome. And
we'll put some of those links too in
the show notes. I'll get some different links,
resources from you that we'll include with the
podcast so people can just click on it
to go get a trial and any of
that. Anything else, Alex, that you want people
(27:40):
to know? Or I don't know if you've
made it out of the conference hall, but
just any other highlights from Ignite or anything
like that you wanna share to wrap up?
Yeah. I have loved walking around at Ignite.
I'm just running into people. I mean, the
it's such a fantastic community. You bump into
IT pros all over the place,
from different organizations, from partners,
(28:02):
MVPs that are helping to house sessions or
educate
the community. So it's a great learning opportunity.
I've loved some of the sessions on how
to do AI and enablement across organizations like
workflow adaptations and so forth. So that's been
a fantastic one for me. Obviously, AI is
everywhere. And I think it's been really cool
listening to people react to some of our
(28:23):
new devices. We rolled out, it's called
the k 950
keyboard,
which is k950
for Windows, which means that you get a
copilot key directly on the keyboard,
like, just like you would get on a
copilot PC. Yep. So that's cool. People are
loving that. But I think in general, these
shows are just fantastic
(28:44):
to meet with other people in the community.
They are. That's one thing I've missed over
the last 5 years. Like, it's interesting because
we're sitting here talking about conference rooms and
making it feel like you're in person, but
there is no matter how good the time,
you feel like you can never replace
what you get at these conferences from that
in person. Like you said, just running into
people, conversations you can have with people, something
(29:05):
I know I've missed a lot over the
last 5 years and enjoyed. Yeah. Companies used
to do these big off sites where everyone
from all these different offices would fly into
some city somewhere and hang out together. But
now, I feel like they're doing an on-site
instead. Everyone flies to the office and then
hangs out in the office for a week,
and then goes back home. Yeah. So it's
fun. The on-site is the new off-site. But,
(29:25):
these are great opportunities for that. And you're
right. Just being able to hang out with
people in person is really cool. Yep. Very
cool. Well, thanks, Alex. Appreciate you joining me
and chatting about your products and Teams Rooms
and all of that. And hope you enjoy
the rest of the conference
and have safe travels. We're all headed home
as it's snowing in Chicago.
It is. Yeah. Thanks, Ben.
(29:48):
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
(30:08):
day.
Welcome to episode
393
of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded
live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss a topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode, Ben is joined on the
(00:24):
show by Alex Mooney from Logitech.
The 2 of them discuss the integration of
technology into meetings. They start out the discussion
by talking about AI for transcribing in person
meetings, highlighting some of their benefits. And then
from there, shift into discussion around various meeting
room systems for Microsoft Teams. They discuss some
of the offerings from Logitech, including the Rally
(00:45):
Bar Huddle, Rally Bar Mini, and Rally Bar,
and how they are certified for both Microsoft
Teams on Android and Windows in order to
work in different scenarios for building out your
Microsoft Teams room systems.
So we're sitting here at Ignite, another
interview.
So it's been a good show. It's day
(01:05):
what day is it? Day 2 or 3
now? 2? 3. I I think day 3?
Messed up with Monday. It's Thursday. It is
day 3. Yes. So I'm sitting here with
Alex from Logitech. So we're gonna talk, like,
Teams, Teams Room Devices, Teams Premium,
maybe some Copilot because that's what everybody talks
about at Ignite.
Copilot. Copilot. Copilot. Yeah. Exactly. So I need
(01:28):
to go ahead and introduce yourself, Alex. Tell
us a little bit about you, what you
do, all that. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. So I'm
Alex Mooney. I work at Logitech in our
alliances group, which is basically just means that
I get to do all the fun stuff
of managing our partnership
with Microsoft.
So
product development,
certifications,
(01:48):
everything in that kind of realm, and then
how we deliver
these products to our customers.
Okay. Very cool. So you're gonna tell us
all the stuff that Logitech's working on. Right?
Yeah. All the things. All the things. Excuse
me. This podcast, to listen to this episode,
you have to sign the NDA. No.
So I'm curious, Alex. Like, I know we
were talking a little bit about some of
the devices, and we'll probably get into that
(02:10):
a little bit later. But more from, like,
a
Windows devices. You guys do a bunch. Like,
I've used Logitech devices forever. You have mice.
You have keyboards. You have meeting room devices.
You have headsets.
So with that, I'm you see a lot
of different aspects of more how people are
working, whether it's working on Windows with peripherals,
(02:30):
Teams meetings.
Like, what have you I guess, maybe even
how have you seen the industry change, or
how are do you see people
working
recently
as they incorporate your devices into their day
to day workflow?
Yeah. It's fine. Logitech,
I guess, for the last 40 years, we
(02:51):
have been creating peripherals
to try to create human interaction with software
and tools,
produced by Microsoft and others. And so whether
it's a keyboard, a mouse, a webcam, a
headset, we've been in this space for a
long time. We only just recently
in the last, I'd say, 12 years, got
into
doing meeting room technology. Okay. And just in
(03:13):
that time, we've been able to kind of
skyrocket
into now the number one position
as an OEM creating Microsoft Teams Rooms, but
more more largely
market share wise with just creation of video
conferencing products around the world. And I think
the reason why is because
during that time frame, people's requirements shifted from
(03:35):
these massive codecs
that were complicated,
$200,000
rooms plus,
and we just wanted to make video
and audio
ubiquitous across all the rooms. We wanted to
make it available to all the users in
the organization. So we took the approach of
saying, hey. We're gonna use USB. We're gonna
use open standards. No one was doing it.
People looked at us like we were crazy.
(03:56):
Why is Logitech making a camera? Don't do
that. But it's fun. And I think that's
why we saw this kind of seismic shift.
After 2020,
we we already knew everyone's gonna go work
from home. Everyone's gonna be remote, and everyone's
gonna need ways to connect
whether it's with super high quality audio or
video or other things. They're gonna need ways
(04:16):
to connect with their coworkers
and to keep their workflows
going. So we already knew that, but it
just accelerated all these trends. It brought them
in 8, 10 10 years in terms of
the adoption.
So I think right now, we're all experiencing
the back end of that. Like, it's just
everyone does video. If I get through a
single day without saying, I'm you're on mute,
(04:38):
it's it's a it's a good day. But,
yeah, that's where we are. And I think
there's a there's a big trend right now
within Microsoft Teams Rooms. So saying, do I
want to have rooms deployed on Windows or
on Android? That's a hot topic right now.
I think looking deeper into the management stacks
is a hot topic. What size of room
should we deploy? Maybe we don't need so
(04:58):
many boardrooms. We can do, like, Huddl rooms,
things like that. So there's a lot of
those questions out. BYOD,
how does AI fit into this ecosystem? Like,
Copilot is everywhere, but Yep. Okay. But how
do I incorporate that into my meeting practice?
I think that's the trend of where we're
seeing everyone go. Okay. So what kind of
trends have you seen? We'll just dive right
into meetings because that one's a popular one
(05:20):
with Copilot.
Right? Is Yeah. Copilot, Teams Premium,
meeting transcriptions, what kind of trends have you
seen
from the AI space,
Copilot,
as well
as meetings,
meeting rooms
Yeah. That type of space? So the I
think one of the most compelling use cases
(05:40):
early on
for Copilot is the meeting summaries
and so forth. Because just in terms of
early adoption, like, I haven't quite figured out
how to incorporate
Copilot into my mainstream workflows in Office and
PowerPoint, so forth. Outlook, this is obvious. Help
me rephrase this this email, summarize what I'm
reading, so forth like that. Yep. These are
(06:01):
very early stage adoptions. So they're easy for
users to wrap their minds around. But one
of the most immediate places where you get
the benefit of the time saving is actually
in the meeting room. So it's, I joined
late, catch me up, or I didn't join
the meeting at all, give me the summary
and and so forth. What were the action
items?
Can we make some notes? These kinds of
(06:22):
things. That I think has been really, really
cool. One thing that we've been trying to
really focus on is, okay, this is great.
We have this amazing technology from Microsoft.
How do we help users get the most
out of that? And it actually starts with
super high quality audio capture. So the more
that we can work with our customers to
make sure that the audio is pristine,
that means that the transcript is accurate. And
(06:44):
when you have an accurate transcript, Copilot gives
you accurate insights. So it starts all the
way back with some of our just basic
AV principles, and then making sure that these
things are happening. So trend wise, I think
that we're seeing a lot of
people trying to look into, do I wanna
turn in turn
on recognition?
Okay. Speaker recognition and so forth, which is
(07:07):
where the in Teams room, the Teams room
will actually identify the various users sitting around
the table. So since Alex is saying this,
Ben's saying that Yep. Versus it's just Teams
user, Teams user.
Right. That's an important one. It takes a
lot of data data governance. Like, how do
I want to, you know, update my privacy
policies to allow this? There's a a moment
(07:28):
there that you have to make some key
decisions as an organization. But I think fundamentally,
just let's make sure that we have really,
really, really good audio. Well and that's an
interesting one because
people
have known that
going back in other technologies. Like, you look
at business intelligence. Right? That's been around for
a while now. And I remember when business
(07:49):
intelligence was first catching on, that was a
big thing as people were like, well, if
I put garbage data into business intelligence,
I'm not gonna get the reports, the metrics
out of it that
maybe I'm looking for. And now it sounds
like you've seen the same thing as for
a long time, and I would say even
today, I get in a lot of meetings,
(08:09):
and people don't necessarily
care about their audio. They're using, like, their
laptop speaker with the lid closed in a
clamshell then.
That audio quality isn't
necessarily
there, and that's not something that I know
I don't know that I've necessarily thought about
that either is, what if you want good
transcripts, you want good summaries, really focusing on
(08:32):
the input. The AI model can only do
so much based on the quality of data
going into it. And some of it's user
training. Don't talk over each other in a
meeting because then the transcription
has a hard time keeping up with who's
saying what in the meeting room. So some
of it is just user behavioral training, but
also,
a lot of it is, yeah, you just
(08:52):
need to know what the person said.
And not everyone speaks as loud. Some people
speak softer. There's all sorts of different ranges
of vocal qualities and so forth. And so
making sure that you have a super high
quality audio pickup for every seat in the
room is a critical component to getting the
most out of the AI investment because otherwise,
(09:12):
you're gonna miss somebody's valuable input. And if
you've missed just one voice out of 10
at a meeting room, well, your transcription is
now not accurate. So all the insights you
gain are actually missing the full picture. So
I think that's a a key element. We're
trying really hard to make sure we're doing
this. So we've got this thing called right
site 2. Okay. Right sound 2. Okay. This
(09:33):
is our AI built into our meeting room
technology
that improves the, auto framing for site. So
the visuals Oh, interesting. Okay.
And the audio performance for right sound. And
so it's really cool. We're doing a lot
of AI algorithms to remove
unwanted sounds, typing,
bag crinkling, like potato chips or whatever. How
(09:54):
about somebody eating an apple? That's what I'm
on. I'm like, I can have meetings and
somebody's like, chomps into an apple, and I'm
like, okay. Come on. Really?
Right by the mic pod too. It's always.
Exactly.
Yeah. So so we are looking for voices,
and then we're looking for commonly unwanted sounds.
So it's a little more than just like
a basic noise reduction, which is like an
(10:15):
audio gating. So it's a lot smarter than
that. And we're removing unwanted sounds, and then
making sure that every voice in the room
is auto leveled. Got it. Quiet speakers, loud
speakers, all come across at approximately the same
volume. And that come coupled with obviously things
like echo cancellation, reverberation
reduction, just to make sure you get a
really nice clean capture. Right. It makes a
(10:37):
a really nice front end audio experience. Much
better than what people might hear on this
given the environment we're sitting in and that
we're not recording this with, that type of
stuff. But On on a trade show floor.
Right. On a trade show floor. Fortunately, for
this, we get the post processing, where a
lot of meetings, you're not you don't have
the advantage of post post processing the audio.
So it's doing, like, real time
(10:59):
AI audio
processing
of all these different voices. Yeah. We jokingly
say we want video
to be better than being there. So we
we want the remote experience to be better
than the in person experience. Now this is
obviously an ambitious
concept. But the point is is that if
you were, like, say, watching a sporting event,
you're watching and
(11:20):
every camera that you saw on the screen
was just the headshot of the person running
around, you miss all the context. It's like,
okay. This is cool. I can see everyone's
face, but I don't actually know what's going
on. Yeah. So what you really want is
someone to intelligently switch the camera views for
you so you always see the action. And
when you're listening to the audio, you don't
wanna listen to everything. You really want something
(11:41):
to curate the audio and make sure that
it's really, really clean. All the noises are
removed. So that's what we're trying to bake
in with AI into all of our products.
That's where Right Sight and Right Sound come
in. Right Sight with things like Logitech Sight
in the center of table doing smart switching.
It does this cool thing where it takes
all the camera lenses in the room, and
then it intelligently switches the view of you
(12:03):
in the gallery based on your head position.
So if you turn your head and you
look at the front of room and you're
addressing the far end user, they see you
looking at them. But if I then turn
across the table to talk to someone that's
collaborating in the room, we'll switch the view
to the center of table camera, see all
the remote experience, you always see the person's
face. Got it. So you're able to we'll
(12:24):
move around this around a minute with your
products. You're able to put multiple
cameras in the room. So if you have,
like, the camera under the screen in the
front, but then a camera on the table
or cameras placed around the room, they can
all work together
Yeah. To really intelligently
give you the best. You get, like, an
automated an AI cameraman
Exactly. In the room. Exactly. Yeah. So let's
(12:46):
use an example of a rally bar. It's
a really common all in one video bar.
We would put that under the display. It's
got speakers,
microphones, and the camera all built into it.
And it's 22 lenses, 2 cameras on board,
a wide angle camera, and then one that
can zoom in and focus.
So when you have 2 there, that's great.
You're gonna cover this big room. But what
if my room is say 15 seats on
(13:08):
a really long table, like a bowling alley?
Yep. The lens can only see from the
front of the table. So if somebody leans
forward, they're blocking all the people behind them.
Right. You can't see them. And so what
we really want is to add additional cameras
down the table. That's where Logitech site comes
in. Okay. So now you have this center
of table camera. It can see everyone around
the table's faces and you have the front
(13:28):
of room, but now you need something to
intelligently direct and and switch which camera view
is being shown so the foreign user doesn't
have to do it themselves. And that's where
the AI comes in. We compare all the
views of Ben in the gallery, and we
say, this is the best picture. Ben, show
that to the foreign user. We don't want
the one that's looking in his ear as
he turns and okay. Yeah.
(13:52):
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected
issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is
here to help. Much like you take your
car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge
on how to best keep your car running,
Intelligent helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment
because that's their expertise.
Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates in
(14:14):
the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether
you are a small organization with just a
few users up to an organization of several
1000 employees, they want to partner with you
to implement and administer your Microsoft Cloud technology.
Visit them at inteliginc.com/podcast.
That's
(14:36):
intelligink.com/podcast
for more information or to schedule a 30
minute call to get started with them today.
Remember, Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so
you focus on your business.
So another thing you mentioned earlier was
(14:56):
Teams Room on Android
and Teams Room on Windows. And I know
this is something that we were talking about,
the actually, the other day. I was here
asking you some questions about it because sometimes
the functionality
differs between
those two platforms. There's pros and cons probably
to each one. What are some of those
things that you've seen
(15:17):
in helping people pick between,
maybe I'm okay with Teams Room on Android
or I want Teams Rooms on Android,
versus
when should I maybe start thinking about Teams
Room on Windows
because of how those 2 kinda compare or
contrast or have different advantages
and such? This is a question that we
get from customers all the time that are
(15:39):
people that are just trying to figure out,
I've gotta manage a 1,000 rooms. Which management
ecosystem do I want? I think that's really
what it boils down to, Windows versus Android.
It comes down to the management ecosystem. Okay.
And some of the feature discrepancies between the
two platforms. Microsoft did a a nice article
not too long ago that kind of shared
their position on where the feature development happens
(15:59):
and so forth. So I think people know
Windows is gonna be the platform you want
to use for your Microsoft Teams room if
you're gonna use things like AI and so
forth like that. If you want intelligent speaker
recognition where you would have, say, a rally
bar in the room, but as different users
in the room speak, it identifies them as
their name instead of just So, like, conference
(16:21):
room 1 or yeah. Yeah. You're gonna get
those features on Windows first. This is where
a lot of the development happens. Android is
super simple to deploy and manage. It's built
into the bars, and so you don't have
a separate PC to manage. So a lot
of companies that are coming out of environments
where they're used to managing, they have their
own AVVLANs
(16:41):
and so forth. They're used to the appliance
Yeah. Model of an AV component. They like
the Android experience because it's just easy, simple
device,
all in one. Attach my license, and I'm
good to go. So it fundamentally just comes
down to where does your particular capabilities and
your team lie? Where what are you more
comfortable managing? Windows PCs or Android devices?
(17:04):
And then from there, what are the specific
needs in each room that you may need?
If you want all the AI, go with
Windows. If you like simplicity for maybe smaller
spaces and stuff, Android's a great option for
that. Logitech
doesn't necessarily
want to tell our users which ones they
need to use because it's it's a very
unique decision for every organization. Everybody's needs are
(17:25):
different. And so what we do, which I
think we do uniquely amongst OEMs, is we
dual certify all of our products for both
Windows and Android. So that same rally bar
that has Android built in Yep. You plug
it in with a USB to a PC,
and now it's a certified Teams Rooms on
Windows device as well. So you have that
kind of option. Got it. And this is
(17:46):
what you had to explain this to me
like a few times. I was trying to
wrap my head around it the other day,
where like, Teams Room on Android is technically
running on the devices. So if you pick
up a Logitech device, one of the Teams
Room devices, put it on the wall, hang
it on the TV, plug it into a
network cable, you can be up and going,
running,
we'll say that quickly. There's the licensing and
(18:07):
stuff to think about as well, but then
you're gonna be running Teams Room on Android.
Right. Because Android is what the OS built
into all your operating systems. And if you
want Teams Room on Windows, you do need
to have another device,
some PC device, mini PC,
full blown computer.
I'm assuming people pulling a laptop into the
room and plugging it in, any of those,
(18:29):
and then it just automatically switches to Teams
Room on Windows?
Yes. There's 3 categories.
We'll say it's BYOD,
meaning I brought my laptop in, I plug
it into the room, and my laptop hosts
the meeting. Okay. The second category is I
have a native Teams room. It's got a
Teams room pro license attached,
and I've made the decision to go with
(18:51):
Teams rooms on Android for the management ecosystem.
In which case, the compute that's that's hosting
the meeting is actually built into the bar
on a chipset that's already integrated into the
bar. And that's the one running Android Right.
For everything. And then there's Teams Rooms on
Windows. If you chose to have a native
Teams Room but running on a Windows PC,
you have the Windows PC in the room
connected to the bar, and the Windows PC
(19:12):
is the one that's hosting the call and
providing those streams back to Microsoft in the
cloud. So it really just depends on where
does the Teams client that's hosting the call
live. Got it. Do you dare get into
licensing? Like, do you talk about licensing when
it comes? Because I know that's another topic.
I have some Teams Room devices at home.
I won't say which ones because they're a
(19:33):
competitor.
We can fix that. We can fix that?
Okay. Good to hear. And then I can
get some experience with those. But I know
some of the licensing has changed to around
Teams Room devices and how
you think about even
which licenses
you may want, how you license devices when
it comes to Teams Room and Microsoft 365.
(19:53):
Is that something you get into or talk
about much, or do you leave that up
to You know it. People? It's really up
to the organization where they are, and every
group is a little bit different because of
where they are in the enterprise agreement with
Microsoft. So there's actually a large number of
people that still have Teams Room standard licenses
or Teams Room premium licenses on their tenant.
(20:16):
Okay. Everyone is moving to either a Teams
Room basic license or a Teams Room pro
license. The pro license has a cost associated
with it. The basic license is free. Okay.
So if you were to take a Logitech
device, like the RallyBar out of the box,
plug it in Yep. And you need to
assign a license, you can assign
the Microsoft Teams Room basic license, which is
(20:36):
free to that device, and you're up and
running with the Teams Room. Okay. There are
simply some limitations. You can only have so
many Teams Room basic licenses
on your tenant, and then then you're there's
just no more available.
And the basic license has a few restrictions
from feature sets, like, dual monitor and AI
capabilities and so forth. So really, it comes
down to I think for most users, they're
(20:59):
gonna be migrating into Teams Room Pro,
licenses anyway, which actually is the right decision
to make because it gives you access to
the pro portal, which has some really great
automatic remediation capabilities
and some really good insights for tracking the
health of devices. You can go in and
see which rooms are the most stable versus
the least, and it gives you a lot
of insights as to which devices should I
(21:21):
deploy, which ones are being most utilized. So
if I have to change my floor plan
around, I know which room sizes are the
most commonly used and so forth like that.
So I think for most users, probably over
the course of the next few months, they're
just gonna be either on a basic or
a pro license. Okay. And that's one thing
I noticed too. I think with pro, I
come from the admin side of it is
(21:43):
I found that I needed Pro, like, if
I wanna manage the devices with Intune as
well. Bring them to the portal, I think,
and doing all the device management. And I'm
trying to remember if you even, like, updates,
being able to manage updates on these devices
from Intune, it was
all go by that pro license. Yeah. If
you want to have the benefit of that
meaningful,
(22:04):
serious management ecosystem,
which is really fantastic that Microsoft
has developed for these these devices,
The pro management portal is the right place
to do that. Okay. And so from there,
in order to get that, you need a
pro license. Yep. So it is the right
decision to make for organizations,
I think, if you have, you know, greater
than 20, 25 rooms. Okay. One other question,
(22:25):
maybe we'll wrap up with this one is
you had mentioned,
like, having these devices, having your conference rooms,
being able to recognize
individual people in the room where you can
and you have 10 people in, and as
you're generating
the transcript, if you're doing the AI summary
and you want names associated with people, being
able to recognize
all of the people in the room as
(22:45):
themselves
versus
it's just the conference room, and it could
have been any one of the people. What
type of process
is that to go through in order to
get that set up and configured? Because I'm
guessing you can't just have 10 people come
into the room, and it's like, oh, I
know who that is. I mean, there's a
lot of information about us on the Internet,
(23:05):
but not that much, I hope. This is
not big brother. We're not using some some
big facial recognition, scrubbing your social media. No.
It's just none of that. So it's actually
really simple. As the tenant, as the admin,
you have to go in and opt in
for your organization to have speaker recognition
enabled for your users. What that's using is
Microsoft's biometric.
(23:26):
And so, basically, once you opt in as
an organization,
all the users have the option to go
into their Teams client, go into the settings
right there from their their desktop Okay. Their
Teams client, go into the settings and enable
recognition, and then enroll their voice and face.
So it's a 2 step process. Admin enables,
and once they enable, the users have the
ability to self enroll. Okay. If they've self
(23:48):
enrolled, what happens when they walk into a
Teams room is the that Teams on the
cloud is going to get their voice
and their face, and it's going to compare
it to the enrolled users and then identify
their name in the transcript. So then in
the participants in a Teams call, instead of
just seeing
ignite meeting room 1, it'll say ignite meeting
(24:08):
room 1, and then under it, it'll say,
Ben and Alex. And every time you speak,
it'll show in the transcript that Ben said
this, and when I speak, Alex said this,
instead of just being meeting room 1 said
all of it. Okay. And then what happens,
let's say because, again, you said it relies
on users enrolling themselves. Yes. If you get
10 people, ten's a nice round number, 5
(24:30):
people enrolled
and 5 people haven't enrolled,
do you get then a mix of individual
users, then you still end up with Ignite
conference room 1 that's the other 10? So
the the enrollment only applies to people in
meeting rooms because if you're logged in through
your own account, maybe you're a remote user,
you're already identified. So your identity is already
in the call. So for those users in
(24:52):
the meeting room, if half of them have
enrolled, they'll all be identified and the other
half will not. So it'll say, for example,
unidentified user
1, 2, 3, 4, 4. Doesn't lump them
all into just the conference room. It still
picks out individual users Right. But they're just
generic
Yeah. User 1, user 2. Unnamed user. Yeah.
Okay. And you do have the option to
(25:13):
go back and add the name manually if
you don't use the biometric to self to
identify it for automatically.
You can go in and manually change the
name from unnamed user 1 to Ben said
Right. If you can pick up who said
what or have everybody, like, come in and
introduce yourselves for the for Copilot. Right? Hi.
I'm Ben.
(25:33):
Very cool. So diving into you mentioned a
few of your products too along along the
way here. I There was the Play Bars,
the
I know you have, like, some different headsets.
Yeah. Are there
recommendations
that you would have for users
or companies
looking to maybe start investing in a Teams
(25:54):
room or if there's and I know it's
gonna depend too based on size of the
conference room, based on size of the company
where maybe devices of, like, people getting started
versus people that have massive conference rooms or
just how would they start getting introduced
to rolling out one of these Teams Room
systems or recommendations from that Logitech product line?
(26:14):
Yeah. A super easy tool would be to
go on to logitech.com/microsoft/trial.
And you can fill out a form there,
and that will send me Okay. Along with
the rest of a large team, a message
that says that you would like to sample
some of these products. You'd like to demo
them. And we do offer up to 2
room systems free for you to put into
(26:35):
your your environment. They're yours to keep. And
then you can get Teams Rooms set up
and going, and you can see how these
these products work in your own environment. And
you can feel, experience the benefit of them.
So that's a great starting place. If we
try to make it really simple, our portfolio
is RallyBar Huddle, RallyBar Mini, and RallyBar.
So Huddle is what it sounds like. So
(26:56):
2, 3, 4, 5 people in a small
to Huddle space. Okay. RallyBar Mini is the
small to medium room, and then Rally Bar
is the medium to large room. Got it.
We just try to make it as easy
as possible to pick the one that's the
right for you right one for you. All
of them are dual certified for both Android
and Windows.
All of them natively work with Microsoft Teams
(27:17):
Rooms right out of the box, and all
of them obviously have the certification
and the full support and warranty and everything
from Logitech and from Microsoft. Okay. Awesome. And
we'll put some of those links too in
the show notes. I'll get some different links,
resources from you that we'll include with the
podcast so people can just click on it
to go get a trial and any of
that. Anything else, Alex, that you want people
(27:40):
to know? Or I don't know if you've
made it out of the conference hall, but
just any other highlights from Ignite or anything
like that you wanna share to wrap up?
Yeah. I have loved walking around at Ignite.
I'm just running into people. I mean, the
it's such a fantastic community. You bump into
IT pros all over the place,
from different organizations, from partners,
(28:02):
MVPs that are helping to house sessions or
educate
the community. So it's a great learning opportunity.
I've loved some of the sessions on how
to do AI and enablement across organizations like
workflow adaptations and so forth. So that's been
a fantastic one for me. Obviously, AI is
everywhere. And I think it's been really cool
listening to people react to some of our
(28:23):
new devices. We rolled out, it's called
the k 950
keyboard,
which is k950
for Windows, which means that you get a
copilot key directly on the keyboard,
like, just like you would get on a
copilot PC. Yep. So that's cool. People are
loving that. But I think in general, these
shows are just fantastic
(28:44):
to meet with other people in the community.
They are. That's one thing I've missed over
the last 5 years. Like, it's interesting because
we're sitting here talking about conference rooms and
making it feel like you're in person, but
there is no matter how good the time,
you feel like you can never replace
what you get at these conferences from that
in person. Like you said, just running into
people, conversations you can have with people, something
(29:05):
I know I've missed a lot over the
last 5 years and enjoyed. Yeah. Companies used
to do these big off sites where everyone
from all these different offices would fly into
some city somewhere and hang out together. But
now, I feel like they're doing an on-site
instead. Everyone flies to the office and then
hangs out in the office for a week,
and then goes back home. Yeah. So it's
fun. The on-site is the new off-site. But,
(29:25):
these are great opportunities for that. And you're
right. Just being able to hang out with
people in person is really cool. Yep. Very
cool. Well, thanks, Alex. Appreciate you joining me
and chatting about your products and Teams Rooms
and all of that. And hope you enjoy
the rest of the conference
and have safe travels. We're all headed home
as it's snowing in Chicago.
It is. Yeah. Thanks, Ben.
(29:48):
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
(30:08):
day.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com