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M365 Perspective

MDEP is here, speaker recognition on MTRoA and GPT-4.5 and 5 coming

Tom Arbuthnot's February round-up: MDEP debuts on a Teams device with Jabra's PanaCast 50 VBS Value Pack 3 firmware, speaker recognition lands on the roadmap for Teams Rooms on Android in April, Facilitator Agent and MTRoW features slip, plus Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum chip and what GPT-4.5 and…

MDEP is here, speaker recognition on MTRoA and GPT-4.5 and 5 coming

Many thanks to Ribbon, this month's Empowering Cloud Benefactor. I recently wrote a whitepaper on why On-Premises Telephony Remains Key, even when moving to UCaaS, with examples of use cases for their Ribbon Edge 8000 Series.

Here is my Microsoft Teams Update Briefing for February. All the news you need to know, including from ISE, in under 15 minutes (and you can grab the deck here).

Microsoft Teams Rooms Express Install, MTRoW Boards + Edge browser and WebApps on MTR Boards, MTRoW Mult-Camera, Microsoft Teams Super Resolution and more...

Microsoft Teams News

It's been relatively quiet on the Microsoft Teams front since ISE. I covered the ISE news in the last newsletter for anyone who missed it or check out the monthly update video.

But we have had some news. Speaker recognition and attribution for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android is now on the roadmap for April (MTR Pro).

Quite a few roadmap moves. Facilitator Agent, client mic activity indicator, seeing chat while screen sharing, start/stop live transcription and live caption translation both on MTRoW all pushed out to April.

Cloud Video Interop for PowerPoint Live was pushed back to March.

The First use of MDEP on a Microsoft Teams device is now live with the Jabra Panacast 50 VBS part of their Value Pack 3 Firmware 6.5.0. This is, of course, also with AOSP management.

Other AOSP management firmware from OEMs are continuing to roll out. Here is the latest list and timelines.

Daryl Hunter has a nice blog on understanding and readiness for AOSP management firmware here.

Quantum breakthrough and GPT 4.5/5 coming soon

While Teams hasn't been that busy, Microsoft has announced new progress in Quantum computing. Microsoft has recently unveiled Majorana 1, a groundbreaking quantum chip that utilizes a new state of matter known as a topological superconductor.

This innovation could enable a path to quantum computers with up to a million qubits on a single chip, potentially solving complex problems beyond the capabilities of today's classical computers.

Sam Altman of Open AI has said to expect GPT-4.5 (Orion) soon. It will be Open AI's last "non-chain-of-thought"/non-reasoning model.

From GPT-5, it will integrate reasoning from models like o3, moving away from the current paradigm of choosing the right model for the right use case. The Open AI subscription model will offer GPT-5 at all tiers but with progressively more power from Free to Pro to Plus. According to rumours, Microsoft is expecting GPT-5 in late May.

Microsoft will host the models on Azure for both OpenAI and its direct Azure AI customers.

I'm curious how and when 4.5 and 5 will be integrated into Microsoft Copilot. If we see a similar alignment where M365 Copilot Chat (included in all M365) gets the more basic capabilities and paid Microsoft 365 Copilot gets the better and computationally more expensive features, similar to the way OpenAI plan to tier GPT-5.

These may be some good topics to discuss in the upcoming Copilot Fireside Chat (see events).

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As always, if you have questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply and let me know. I read all the replies.

Thanks

Tom

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