I’ve recently been working on reconfiguring my existing Ribbon SBCs to support Microsoft Teams. There are a few decent blogs around showing how to configure Direct Routing (and this is easy enough), but not many about the newest feature, Local Media Optimization (LMO). If I’m honest, this has taken me quite a while to get working so I thought it was worth sharing my finished config. There are a few subtle differences and a couple of gotchas I have experienced that this blog might help you with. Benefit from my hours, days and weeks of tinkering.

In my opinion, the…

If you are playing around with location based routing or local media optimization in Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, you will have no doubt had to configure Trusted IPs and network sites in Microsoft Teams. In order for LBR or LMO to work correctly, a client needs to be determined to be “internal”. This is done using Trusted IPs and network subnets in the Network Topology section of the Teams Admin Center. It is often wise to check if what you have configured is correct. …

If you’ve stumbled upon this post, you’ve probably run into a problem joining a Microsoft Teams meeting using a 3PIP phone such as a Polycom Trio, Polycom VVX, AudioCodes or Yealink.

As explained in this excellent and thorough post by Jeff Schertz, Microsoft have implemented a SIP to Teams audio gateway to enable 3PIP phones to join Microsoft Teams meetings until July 31, 2023. The idea being there is nothing to configure from an admin point of view; it should just work.

As Jeff alludes to, there is a dependence on Skype for Business Online for this gateway mode to…

I think it’s pretty safe to say that background blur or custom backgrounds is one of the most used and most liked features of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft did a lot of people a favour by escalating it’s release to help with the Covid-19 situation where most of the world started working from home.

However, some people might find that the feature isn’t available. Below are all the reasons I know of why this might be the case:

AVX/AVX2 hardware requirement

There has been a bit of confusion around this one. When background blur was first released it was supported on CPUs that could…

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but since the recent 4.0.105.0 update to the Skype Room System (SRS) which has now become Microsoft Teams Room (MTR), I thought I would summarise the user experience in and out of a Teams meeting, with and without content, single or dual screen.

Note: The screenshots will show the new ‘Universal bar for in-meeting call controls’ when in a Teams meeting. Whilst announced as part of 4.0.105.0 this is actually being rolled out via the Teams rings that your organisation will be part of. …

I’ve already written a bit about the Crestron Flex solution in a separate thread about Microsoft Teams Rooms, but thought I’d give it it’s own post considering the interest that the Crestron Flex solution seems to be getting at the moment. So, here goes…

Crestron have broken down their Flex offering into four ‘series’ of devices:

P-Series

The P-Series are personal desktop devices. Currently, there are two re-badged Yealink devices, the UC-P100-T and the UC-P110-T. The only difference is that the screen of the P110 tilts. They run the native Teams audio-only software developed by Microsoft.

As some of you may know, the company I work for is on a quest to define a new set of room standards for video conferencing. We have long been a Microsoft house and have run their communications suite going all the way back to LCS. Our standard for the past 6-ish years has been primarily been based around Polycom’s Group Series which has served us (very) well. …

Just over a year ago I had a bit of a rant about the state of the native Microsoft meeting room systems. You can read the original post here.

Since that time the original post has had almost 5000 views, we’ve had Ignite, we’ve had Enterprise Connect, Trump has damaged the world some more, Brexit still hasn’t happened, Skype Room System is now called Microsoft Teams Rooms but most importantly, new hardware is starting to appear.

So, I thought it was time for a bit of an update to see where we are on the three areas I was moaning…