Microsoft Teams gets this new look on Surface Hub

Get rid of the old Surface Hub Teams app and in November with Teams Rooms for Surface Hub.

Microsoft is discontinuing its old Surface Hub Teams app. It introduces a new experience through Teams Rooms for Surface Hub with a number of feature updates to improve collaboration in hybrid work arrangements.

Microsoft has started the rollout

of the new Teams experience for Surface Hub, the interactive meeting room whiteboard built to work well with Teams. Surface Hub 2S is available with a 50-inch and 85-inch screen with Windows 10 and Teams built-in.

According to Microsoft, the new Teams Rooms for Surface Hub will replace the legacy Surface Hub Teams app globally over the next four weeks. It is available to customers in commercial, GCC and GCC High environments.

Microsoft is bringing features from the desktop and Teams Rooms to the meeting room through Teams Rooms for Surface Hub. It offers a new meeting phase, improved meeting controls and Teams features such as scenes in Together mode, a large gallery, chat bubbles, live responses, PowerPoint Live and Whiteboard.

Separately, this month, Microsoft released a major overhaul of its Whiteboard brainstorming app for Teams to give it a cleaner, more modern look. Whiteboard has become essential for some business users who need to collaborate with team members in the office and others at home.

“Teams Rooms on Surfac Hub enriches collaboration for the hybrid workplace. You can easily access your Microsoft 365 files and use a richer Whiteboard experience to present and collaborate,” Microsoft says confidently.

The alignment of Teams Rooms on Surface Hub with Teams on desktop is intended to create consistency for users who use the collaboration platform across devices such as mobile, desktop, and the Surface Hub.

A redesigned calendar page provides quick access to meetings, Meet Now and a Dial-Pad to initiate PSTN calls for easier switching between calendar items.

Teams Admin Center

Later this year, Microsoft will release “Teams Admin Center”, a self-managed platform to remotely monitor and manage the Teams Rooms experience on Teams devices. It will be available to Microsoft Teams Rooms customers at no additional cost, according to Microsoft.

It will also release a managed service of Microsoft Teams Rooms, billed by Microsoft as an “AI-powered, cloud-based IT management and monitoring service that keeps Microsoft Teams Rooms devices up-to-date and proactively monitors.”

License

The managed service is available to customers with a Microsoft Teams Rooms Premium license.

To get the new experience, administrators must ensure that the Surface Hub has the latest Windows version 19042.1202.

Then Teams Rooms on Surface Hub (KB5004196) installs Teams version 1.4.00.14501 and “automatically upgrades to the latest available version during regular maintenance hours,” Microsoft says.

Source: zdnet