On Tuesday 22nd March, AVI-SPL UK&I hosted our first in-person event in over 2 years and what a fantastic day it was! We kicked off our Microsoft Teams Tour 2022 in London with an exclusive ‘invite only’ session focused on what is takes to create meeting equity in the hybrid era with Microsoft Teams.
On what was a beautiful day, the venue was just as fitting. The Rose Shure Experience Centre, located on Level 5 of 24 King William Street, opposite the Monument to the Great Fire of London, proved to be an ideal venue to bring people together again for an agenda that encouraged networking, learning and lots of product demonstrations with Microsoft Teams at the core.
After a quick coffee and mingle, our attendees took their seats to hear from an experienced panel of speakers from Microsoft and AVI-SPL aswell as a special guest from the UK Microsoft Teams community. Our UK&I MD Michael Kellaway opened the session welcoming everyone to the event and gave an overview of AVI-SPL to the many new faces who hadn’t met us before. Richard Barrett, Teams Technical Specialist at Microsoft then delved into the recently published Microsoft Work Trend Index 2022 ‘Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work’ looking at the 5 main findings in more detail. Richard then shared some of the latest updates to Teams with impressive clips on the large screen getting the audience’s attention.
We then heard from Tom Arbuthnot, founder of Empowering.Cloud and Microsoft Certified Master, MVP who has many years of experience working with global companies on their Microsoft Teams programs. Tom has amassed a popular following on his MS Teams blog TomTalks. Tom shared some of the most crucial keys to successful Microsoft Teams deployment and adoption based on his real-world experience.
Craig Bentley and Robert Billinghurst from our AVI-SPL UK Microsoft Business Practice then rounded off the opening part of the day discussing our approach to planning, deployment and support with AVI-SPL’s global service offering and getting the benefit from pairing up AVI-SPL Symphony and Teams Room Premium licencing within the hybrid workplace. The team also covered off some considerations for deploying the new Front Row layout in Microsoft Teams Rooms and some of the new features coming to Surface Hub 2S.
The room then broke out to a much-needed spot of lunch and conversation over-looking the London Bridge. Batteries re-charged, onto the main event for many of our guests who had come to see the Microsoft Teams technology showcase area. A unique chance to get ‘hands-on’ with different Microsoft Teams Rooms set-ups on our custom-built display stands from the various Teams certified manufacturers including Logitech, Poly, Jabra, Yealink, HP, Lenovo and EPOS. We had another dedicated area to personal workspace devices, for at home or in the office at the desktop, where we had a large number of headsets, speakers and phones certified for Microsoft Teams. The Microsoft Surface Hub 2S was also on show for demo’s and the team from Shure gave the breakout groups an impressive demonstration of the Shure Microsoft certified Microflex ecosystem and IMXRoom software DSP (which included the new AI Denoiser feature). We had a team of experts on hand to demonstrate various features and let visitors see for themselves the vast range of collaboration technology on display! (see our slider gallery at bottom of this post for a closer look at the MS Teams certified products that were on display).
As visitors filtered away into the London afternoon sunshine our team were left to reflect on a wonderful day of interaction with end-users which has been missed throughout the pandemic. It also fulled our ambition to take this event on the road to more cities across the UK in the coming weeks and months, watch this space for more details.
If you are looking to deliver a unified Microsoft Teams experience across your hybrid workplace, contact our team today to arrange a Microsoft hybrid meetings workshop.
