Teams Insider

Lessons from BT's Large Scale Microsoft Teams Rooms Deployment

James Robinson spent 12 years at BT, finishing as head of audiovisual and office technology, and has now set up his own consultancy, AVenture Audio Visual. He walks through BT's move from one of the UK's largest Skype for Business on-premises estates to roughly 1,200 Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surfac

Prefer audio?

Who should listen: M365 service owners, digital workplace leads and AV/UC professionals planning or operating large-scale Microsoft Teams Rooms estates, particularly anyone setting room standards, vendor strategy or update rings.

Guest: James Robinson — Director & Principal AV Consultant, AVenture Audio Visual

Many thanks to AudioCodes, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

BT ran what was widely believed to be the largest UK Skype for Business on-premises estate at around 120,000 users at peak; the pandemic forced the Teams migration of about 100,000 users in roughly three months, including 30,000 enterprise voice users moving from data-centre SBCs to virtual SBCs in the cloud for Direct Routing. ▶ 3:07
VPN concurrency jumped from 8,000–10,000 pre-pandemic to 60,000–80,000, and Skype for Business video had to be throttled to 240p — a clear demonstration that on-prem UC infrastructure was never designed for an all-external workforce. ▶ 5:12
The Better Workplace programme consolidated 300 UK offices into 30 and, critically, moved AV ownership to a single central IT/digital workplace team — before that, individual directors bought their own kit, leaving a mix of Polycom conference phones, Cisco spider phones and projectors borrowed from reception. ▶ 7:15
Windows was chosen over Android for MTR largely because HR sponsors demanded room branding on the device: BT changed its logo and colour scheme three or four times, and flipping a Teams Rooms background is far cheaper than repainting offices. Custom themes still weren't available on Android at the time. ▶ 13:20
Of roughly 1,200 rooms deployed, 700–800 were MTR and 400–500 Surface Hub — and BT bought more Surface Hubs than it needed. Nobody edited Office files on them; most users just stood up, pressed join and sat back down, and the mics/speakers were tuned for the person at the panel, not an 8m room. Gen 1 Hubs at £27,000 MSRP are too expensive to throw away, so they were refocused into training spaces. ▶ 18:04
Surface Hubs on wheels for ad-hoc desk-side Teams calls failed in practice — open-plan neighbours didn't want to hear the call — and were replaced by displays with Miracast and AirPlay only. Miracast-only presentation rooms also fell short once around 5% of London and Birmingham staff were on MacBooks. ▶ 19:36
With devices on internet-only 'red side' networks and no corporate LAN or VPN access, Lenovo ThinkSmart Manager plus Intel vPro KVM was the deployment lifeline: an on-site engineer scanned a QR code, and the team pushed room credentials, updated Poly Lens drivers, set speaker-tracking modes or programmed Biamp DSPs remotely. Only custom themes needed hands-on KVM work. ▶ 22:44
Update rings across ~700 MTRs were: a full lab replica of every room combination on a two-week soak, then around 50 production devices covering each combination as guinea pigs, then ~600 devices, with C-suite rooms last. Before Pro licensing gave that control, a day-one patch took out the boardroom MTR and had to be physically swapped — Microsoft pulled the patch after only two of 700 rooms had taken it. ▶ 29:24
Standards were redesigned annually — Lenovo's fourth MTR generation still used the same management platform, support process and account manager — and peripherals were locked to cookie-cutter small/medium/large designs with interop testing each year. Break your standard only for a compelling reason, such as HP Poly's G9 supporting four touch panels in a very large room; putting a Logitech Tap in one room and a Lenovo controller in another just means running two management platforms for the same function. ▶ 26:23