What’s the future of Microsoft Teams Rooms?
Recently, Matthew Marzynski, Principal Program Manager, team leader at The Hive, described their journey - and their future.
For students of existing and future hybrid workspaces like me, this was a fruitful hour from The Hive, Microsoft’s mythical R&D space, yielding pages of notes.
The session had surprises, but all positive. As a former aircraft interiors designer, Matthew emphasised the need to describe the ideal user experience before getting out the tech toolbox. I call this a process of reverse engineering: start with the end in mind. (My own workflows include developing these into specific, measurable metrics that can be certified and scaled up and out.)
The iterative nature of this work cannot be under-emphasised - it needs to be in the DNA of all organisations’ MTR strategies.
Although the focal interest was the new main space in The Hive, taking the mantle of ‘Enhanced Meeting Room’, it was acknowledged that these represent the top tier of these spaces - but the minority of deployments. Each organisation will want a handful of all-singing rooms for the C-suites - but how to deploy Teams in SMEs, in existing nooks and crannies of real-world organisations was a substantive discussion here.
The large 21:9 screen, which supports the Front Row layout, drew attention. It uses ALR material, but ostensibly of the coated rather than the so-called optical type. (This addresses displaying images from acute-angled UST lenses, but how to project in normally-lit spaces using optical ALR is maybe the road less travelled, as yet.)
Thanks as ever to Michel Bouman and Jimmy Vaughan for hosting these sessions - real crunchy stuff happens here, with a sense of fun and inclusion.
Download the latest copy of my White Paper on MTR design here.
Posted: 1st August 2022