Teams Insider

Deploying Teams Rooms and Teams Phone in Finance

Charles Mason heads up the digital workplace function at TP ICAP, the world's leading inter-dealer broker, covering Microsoft 365, device management, enterprise voice and AV across 28 countries and around 60 offices. He talks through standardising on Android Teams Rooms, moving trader voice and call

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC and AV leads in regulated or financial services organisations planning Teams Rooms standardisation, Teams Phone migration from Cisco Call Manager, mobile call recording, or early Copilot governance.

Guest: Charles Mason — Head of Digital Workplace / Modern Workplace Service Owner, TP ICAP

Many thanks to Logitech, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

TP ICAP's early Windows-based Teams Rooms estate (around 40 rooms) was knocked out more than once by uncoordinated OS, OEM firmware and Teams Rooms updates — a display adapter update alone blanked touch panels across the estate. ▶ 11:51
The bigger lesson from those outages was over-engineering: wireless content sharing boxes, auto-switchers and PoE injectors added failure points that were painful to diagnose from a central team, so the redesign deliberately stripped the room down to bar, touch controller and network. ▶ 12:51
With only one or two IT people in most offices, TP ICAP chose Android (Logitech Rally Bar plus Tap IP) so a remote person could follow a simple set of instructions to plug in and set up a room; camera quality, ease of setup and global supply drove the vendor decision, since Microsoft's UI makes the user experience broadly identical across vendors. ▶ 13:53
As a broking house TP ICAP runs its own internal NTP and blocks external time sources — the Logitech devices defaulted to an Android external NTP and would not sign in until that was repointed. Packet inspection bypasses for the M365 service endpoints were also needed. ▶ 15:26
Logitech Sync is used to hold firmware a step ahead of Microsoft's update rings: new versions land only on a test unit in London first, and there is no business pressure to be on the latest release. ▶ 18:30
Voice is moving off three regional Cisco Call Manager clusters towards Teams direct routing with self-managed SBCs; enabling media bypass in APAC removed the latency of hauling media over WAN links and materially accelerated the move to Teams voice. ▶ 24:09
Teams Phone Mobile via Verizon in the US lets mobile calls be captured by the existing Teams recording licence rather than a separate mobile recording platform — long a weak point in finance — though call presentation into the recording stack needed work. ▶ 25:11
Copilot adoption forced a move to the Office monthly enterprise channel, which is riskier given the number of bespoke front-office market data applications; the free web Copilot with commercial data protection is being used as the training and prompt-building on-ramp ahead of wider M365 Copilot licensing at $30 per user per month. ▶ 08:45
Agents built in Copilot Studio by citizen developers are the next governance problem — TP ICAP is standing up a centre of excellence and best practice so local innovation is not shut down but ownership, change management and support are clear. ▶ 32:24