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 support AVX which came as part of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture back in the beginning of 2011. …

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…

If there ever was a blog post borne out of learning something on the fly, it’s this one.

Okay, before I start, when I talk about SfB* coexistence modes, I mean any of the SfBWithTeamsCollab, SfBWithTeamsCollabAndMeetings or SfBOnly coexistence modes. I don’t want to type SfBWithTeamsCollab about a million times. I might also refer to SfBWithTeamsCollab as ‘collab mode’.

So, long story short, we’ve moved the vast majority of our users over to SfBWithTeamsCollab coexistence mode. We still have a few on Islands mode, and we have a few test users in TeamsOnly mode.

With regards to Skype, we’re still predominantly running Skype for Business Server 2015, in hybrid. We have about 1000 people in Skype Online, but there is another long and boring story why we haven’t moved everyone yet. …

I recently changed the default coexistence mode for my entire organisation of 20,000 users from Islands mode to SfBWithTeamsCollab mode and learned a few things along the way which are probably worth sharing.

Our pilot of Microsoft Teams has grown organically over the last 12–18 months to ~5000 people and ~1000 teams. …

Quick one, if you need to force a refresh or rebuild of the Microsoft Teams client cache on Windows or Mac, do the following:

1. Quit Microsoft Teams
2. Delete or rename the following directory/folder:

Windows

%AppData%\Microsoft\Teams\IndexedDB

Mac

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams/IndexedDB

3. Start Microsoft Teams.

The folder you renamed or deleted will be recreated and a fresh cache will be downloaded from the service.

The client does this automatically every 24 hours but to speed up certain changes this might help.

So far, I have seen this help the following:

1. Speed up caching delay when moving other users to SfB* coexistence modes.
2. When moving an Islands user from Skype on-prem to Skype online, chat with SfB* coexistence mode users won’t work until the cache is updated. …