In the past years, the MS Teams clients for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac/IOS as well as the Progressive Web App, have evolved to include many capabilities to enhance the user experience. As a result, MS Teams has seen widespread adoption within enterprises all over the world and has become the dominant way to host and attend conferences, from behind the desk or in a meeting room. Microsoft continues with this focus and has recently adopted a dual strategy towards BYOD conferencing, with the purpose to highly personalize the desk use and to optimize the meeting room experience for collaborative use.
In the desk experience, following capabilities will enable a highly personalized experience:
- Detailed selection of peripherals
- Voice isolation, removing any other voice from the call
- Use of avatars
- Background blur
In the meeting room experience, following capabilities will enhance the in-room experience
- Selection of the room audio system and camera
- Voice attribution, the ability to identify who is speaking at which moment
- Disabling voice isolation, making sure everyone is heard in the room
- Enhanced copilot recap
- Custom on-screen layouts
- Additional insights, enabling the admin to monitor and optimize the Teams experience
The choice of the "desk" or "meeting room" experience mode is triggered by the audio selection in the Teams pre-join dialogue. Select Computer audio to enjoy the "desk" experience or opt for "Room audio" to enable the meeting room experience.
 |  |
| When joining the room with “Computer audio”, the Teams client optimizes the experience for personal use | When joining the room with “Room”, the Teams client will optimize the experience for in-room use |
The above functionality is only available for ClickShare Conference Base Units in combination with Gen 4.0 or more recent buttons (see KB 3998). Furthermore, the setup must offer speakerphone functionality that can be exposed by the Button as Room Speakerphone.
To facilitate the selection of the room experience, the Teams client will gradually be improved to nudge the end-user to select the Room audio by highlighting the option in blue, as it does when you are in an MTR room. Next to nudging the end-user, there are also ways for the administrator to have the Teams client select the "Room audio" by default when using a ClickShare Button. To enable this, an admin will need to add ClickShare devices into rooms in the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal (https://portal.rooms.microsoft.com/ ).
By default, when at least 5 different users in your enterprise use ClickShare in their Teams call, the ClickShare Button will show up in the portal under Planning > Inventory > Devices (https://portal.rooms.microsoft.com /planning/inventory). In the future, it will be enough for the ClickShare Button to show up here for the user to be nudged towards the "Room audio".
To make sure the "Room audio" is selected by default, you will need to organize the ClickShare Buttons into rooms for now. No additional license is needed for this capability. Soon, the Teams client will automatically select 'Room Audio' when you have a ClickShare Button plugged into your computer before joining the Teams call.
 |
| Example of a ClickShare Button showing up in the Pro Portal after at least 5 different users have used it in their Teams call |
If you wish to have additional insights on these rooms in the Microsoft Teams Pro Management portal, a Teams Shared Device license will need to be applied on these rooms in the Pro Portal.
By default, you will only see a single ClickShare Button show up in the Pro Portal with a single Serial number. In case you are interested to track usage and have additional insights per meeting room in the Pro Portal, you can change the identification of the ClickShare Buttons to be unique per meeting room. To have a unique serial number per meeting room, go to XMS Cloud or to the ClickShare Configurator of the ClickShare Base Unit, under System > Buttons and select the Unique per Meeting Room USB identification method. Buttons that are active at that moment in time will be automatically updated with the new USB identification. The other buttons will need to be re-paired. You can follow up on the identification method and the buttons that still need to be re-paired in the list of Buttons on the Buttons page.
Note: "Unique per Meeting Room" button IDs requires ClickShare firmware version 2.20.
Once the method has been changed and Buttons have been updated (manually or automatically through Button use), you can import the Buttons into the Pro Portal either one-by-one manually or in bulk via an export from XMS Cloud.
To export the list from XMS Cloud, go to XMS Cloud Manage > Clients. There you will find an export button that will provide you with an .xlsx file that you can import in the Pro Portal (available in XMS Cloud as of October 2024). For your convenience, the name of the peripheral will contain the room name of the ClickShare Base Unit where the Button is paired, as shown in the Base Unit admin pages or XMS. In that way, you can easily identify which Button is in which room and easily add it to the right room account in the Pro Portal.
 |
| Export Clickshare Buttons in a format that can be imported into the Pro Portal |
 |
| Import the Clickshare Buttons into the Inventory overview of the Pro Portal. As shown in the image, each Clickshare Button contains the name of the meeting room for reference |
