Stop Short-Changing your meeting room experience

UPLIFT YOUR PC + WEBCAM INTO SOMETHING BETTER.

In our travels assisting organisations get the most out of Microsoft 365, we see a lot of meeting room setups. It’s not uncommon to come across dozens of rooms that have been setup with a standard PC running windows and a consumer web cam on top of a TV. Whilst this might meet basic conferencing requirements, there are many reasons why you may want to rethink this strategy.

WHY IS THIS A BAD APPROACH?

End user experience – a keyboard and mouse should be nowhere to be seen in your meeting rooms, and for good reason. The meeting join workflow should be simple and intuitive: your staff should be able to walk into a meeting room and click join. That’s it.

Security – what account are you using on your meeting room PCs? Are users signing in with their own credentials to have meetings? What happens at the end of the meeting? Meeting room conferencing platforms take these kinds of things into consideration and protect your organisation from security incidents.

Management – how are you managing these bespoke meeting room setups? Utilising fit for purpose meeting room solutions given you access to the right management portals and analytics to help you both manage rooms and track their usage.

Advanced Features – Proximity join, content capture, dynamic front of room display options, HDMI content sharing. These features are native to Microsoft Teams Room systems and cannot be taken advantage of if you’re using standard windows PCs in your meeting rooms.

WHAT SHOULD YOU BE DOING?

Note: We would generally recommend customers buy prebuilt bundles from OEMs like Poly & Logitech. But if you are budget conscious and cash strapped, this is a way to uplift those meeting rooms without re-investing in compute and other hardware.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

A Logitech TAP panel or Poly GC8 USB Touch Panel – talk to us if you need these supplied as they usually come as part of a bundle (Circa $1000 AUD)
A Poly Studio X USB Camera or Logitech MeetUp camera (Circa $1300 AUD)
A 32Gb USB Stick
Teams Room Standard or Teams Room Premium license in Microsoft 365
Windows 10 Volume License Media (Windows 10 Version 2004 Updated November 2020 – YOU MUST GET THIS ONE otherwise it won’t work. You need a specific build number.)

WHAT YOU WILL GET:

A standardised supported Teams Meeting Room device/appliance
Better audio & video experience
Single touch join to meetings
Beaconing & quick join options from mobile / PC devices
Casting capability from Microsoft Teams client
Room Remote capability from iOS/Android

WHERE TO START?

Configure a Microsoft Teams Rooms console – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

From a standard Windows 10 PC (your laptop or desktop or other) download the CreateSrsMedia.ps1 script.

You’ll need to run this in a PowerShell Window as Administrator.

Note: You may need to run this Script via this mechanism

“Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\CreateSrsMedia.ps1” to bypass PowerShell execution policy.

This will then download the SRS (Teams Room Systems old name) Deployment Kit from Microsoft. After it downloads and extracts you should be at this window:

You will want to select Enterprise.

And then 7 for None

You’ll need to specify the target USB drive (should be 0 or 1 but please make sure you select the right one, as you’ll lose everything on that USB!)

And you’re done!

Now you need to boot your NUC off the USB – should be straightforward for techie types.

Reinstall the OS from the USB.

The NUC/compute should reboot to a similar screen to this:

Now, make sure you’ve connected your Touch Panel (GC8 or Logitech TAP) as the Setup process won’t continue unless you have a validated panel connected to the device. GC8 will connect via USB and the Logitech TAP can connect via USB & Cat5E.

Follow the Wizard prompts to sign in your account and select the right audio devices (hopefully you upgraded your audio/video capabilities to something with better microphone & speaker!) and you’re good to go.

Wha-la! Enjoy your upgraded Microsoft Teams Room experience.

OPTIMISE YOUR MEETING EXPERIENCE WITH MICROSOFT TEAMS ROOMS

Microsoft Teams Room solutions turn any room into an easy-to-use and inclusive collaboration space where everyone has a place at the table, regardless of where they sit.