Damian Lewis at BSI on Creating a First Class Microsoft Teams Rooms Experience at Their New London HQ

Who should listen: M365 service owners, digital workplace leads and AV professionals scoping or delivering a new-build office fit-out, plus anyone planning Teams Rooms adoption programmes or weighing all-in-one bars against integrated Q-SYS rooms.

Guest: Damian Lewis — Digital Workplace Specialist, BSI (British Standards Institution)

Damian Lewis leads everything Teams-related at BSI, from Teams Phone to Teams Rooms. He walks through the design and rollout of the meeting room estate at BSI's new London headquarters, The Acre, covering vendor selection, cable-free room design, booking panels, adoption tactics and the operational model for a global rooms footprint.

Many thanks to Jabra, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Getting AV a seat at the table on a new build takes persistence: the office-move working group had been running long before IT was engaged, and it took months to earn the ear of senior stakeholders who had already picked the building and furnishings.
• A hard 'no cables' requirement removed an entire class of support tickets — BSI has not had to replace a single HDMI cable since occupation, because users can no longer get their hands on one. The only exception is a USB-C tether in the small 'hot office' rooms.
• Proof-of-concept kit in the old building was the strongest selection tool: after a Jabra PanaCast bar sat in a room for four or five weeks and was then removed, facilities emailed asking for it back — that complaint was the buying signal.
• Room tiers were matched to space, not standardised blindly: PanaCast 50 BYOD bars in hot offices, a Neat Board Pro on an adaptive wall mount (sliding, not floor stand) in a casual sofa space, PanaCast on Windows MTR for medium rooms, Huddly cameras with Q-SYS audio where unfinished industrial ceiling heights put the space out of reach of an all-in-one bar, and six full Q-SYS ACPR rooms, three of them divisible.
• Q-SYS Vision Suite (formerly See Vision) presenter tracking lets roaming execs leave the lectern while the camera pans and follows, so remote attendees get a tight shot rather than a wide room view.
• Plan for commissioning time to be eaten by build snags: two weeks of clear, dust-free access was scheduled and only two days materialised, so day one was accepted as imperfect and the estate has matured over six months of occupancy.
• Matrix Booking handles desk, room, parenting and multi-faith space bookings and APIs into Microsoft 365; every panel has a shared device licence. The gap is walk-up booking — pressing reserve on the panel logs it only as 'reserved' with no user identity, unlike scanning the QR code. A GAL prompt on walk-up would close the loop back to the mailbox and Matrix.
• Adoption ran on three tracks: 'influencers' from the working group trained on day one as train-the-trainer, an online building induction, and a fortnightly AV 'ask me anything' for the first six months. The same playbook was replayed for the North America office go-live and is now being scaled down for single-room refreshes at existing sites like Milton Keynes.
• Operations are fully in-house from Sydney to San Jose, with regional first-line teams escalating up. Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal covers the majority of monitoring, but OEM tooling still catches faults Pro reports as healthy — one Milton Keynes room showed green in Pro while the OEM alert and an on-site technician both confirmed it was offline.

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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