Inside Novo Nordisk's Microsoft Teams Rooms Journey — Thousands of Rooms and Counting

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC/AV leads and workplace technology architects running large, mixed meeting room estates — particularly anyone weighing MTR Windows versus Android, managing CVI legacy kit, or building a lifecycle and chargeback model.

Guest: Christopher Amdi Mark — Senior IT Architect, Novo Nordisk

Christopher Amdi Mark is Senior IT Architect at Novo Nordisk, where he sets global standards for unified communications and meeting rooms across a 72,000-employee pharmaceutical business. He walks through the estate's move from Tandberg and Cisco RoomOS via CVI, through a fast MTR Windows rollout on Logitech and Lenovo, to almost 2,500 Cisco MTR on Android devices, plus the operational realities of managing a mixed estate.

Many thanks to Cisco, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Novo Nordisk has roughly 7,000–8,000 meeting rooms for about 72,000 employees — roughly one room per ten staff — but only around half are video enabled, leaving some 4,000 rooms with nothing more than a screen and a drop cable. ▶ 6:44
• CVI joins from Cisco endpoints looked worse than a native Webex meeting because the endpoint's traffic wasn't prioritised, so a high-resolution camera ended up sending a poor picture — one of the triggers for putting all the eggs in the Microsoft basket. ▶ 11:20
• The first MTR standard was Lenovo core plus Logitech Rally Bar / Rally Bar Mini; trials were excellent but the rollout moved too fast for the product's maturity — Teams app updates not arriving, Windows updates landing at the wrong times, and touch panel resolution failures that could only be fixed by pulling the plug. ▶ 13:55
• Because MTR Windows devices sit in the same digital workplace department as desktop, Novo Nordisk was able to separate policies and conditional access compliance so the two estates never accidentally affected each other — a structural advantage many organisations lack. ▶ 13:24
• The estate now stands at just under 2,500 Cisco MTR on Android (Room Bar, Room Bar Pro, Room Kit EQ, Desk Pro), about 650 MTR Windows and around 600 RoomOS endpoints still joining via CVI; nothing gets ripped off the wall before end of life for sustainability reasons. ▶ 20:35
• Support runs three tiers: an external partner on first level, regional IT with some AV knowledge on site (a restart fixes almost everything), then a global AV queue skilled in Control Hub and the Microsoft portals. Hardware issues are triaged in Webex Control Hub, Teams client and sign-in issues in Teams Admin Center / Pro Management Portal. ▶ 23:12
• Pro Management Portal generates too many incidents of questionable value — a front-of-room display flagged as faulty when it has simply gone into standby — which erodes trust in the signals and makes proactive support hard to justify. ▶ 25:15
• Because the team pays for licences and service fees but charges hardware back to the line of business, it cannot fund lifecycle replacement centrally; the Cisco Touch 10 end-of-life has taken repeated warnings and a long process because users will wait as long as they possibly can. ▶ 30:18
• Cisco IX5000 telepresence suites were replaced with an immersive MTR of a 21:9 screen, banana-shaped table and front row for a fraction of the original cost — though MTR on Android still doesn't properly support the 21:9 format. ▶ 40:08
• BYOD is treated as "bring your own disaster" because unmanaged devices remove transparency, but a managed BYOD bar is under consideration: four small BYOD rooms may be better value than one medium Teams Room, and it solves sub-entity users who can't book or see the same Exchange resources. ▶ 27:46

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

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