The Importance of Standardisation: Rolling out Microsoft Teams Rooms to 450 Rooms Globally

Prefer audio?

Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, AV and workplace technology leads, and UC operations teams planning a multi-site Teams Rooms refresh, standardising room archetypes, or building in-house design and service-management capability instead of outsourcing it.

Guest: Andrew Liptrot — Service Owner and Product Lead, AV and Workplace Technology, Haleon

Andrew Liptrot leads AV and workplace technology as a service owner and product lead at Haleon, the global consumer healthcare company with more than 24,000 employees across over 100 markets. He explains how a 450-room global estate is moving off legacy on-premises video and CVI onto Microsoft Teams Rooms, using four outcome-based room archetypes, a deliberately small component set and an in-house design and service-management capability.

Key insights

• Haleon's service scope goes well beyond meeting rooms — digital signage and wayfinding, visitor management, space management, desk reservation and building sensors/IoT all sit in the same team, which is why room uptime alone is treated as an insufficient measure of success. ▶ 3:33
• Around 200–300 of the estate's rooms are legacy on-premises video endpoints reaching Teams via CVI and are due for uplift; framing them as 'legacy' is part of resetting user expectations, which had drifted down to PIN codes, passwords and button-pressing to join a call. ▶ 5:37
• Standards were set against three explicit priorities — reliability, supportability and leveraging existing global vendor partnerships — after reviewing what had not gone well in the earlier phase of the Teams Rooms rollout. ▶ 8:09
• Four room archetypes replace seat-count naming: Meet (small catch-up spaces), Create (interactive touch and co-authoring so the work happens in the room rather than being presented), Engage (town halls and external/consumer sessions) and Influence (boardroom-grade multi-camera rooms for equitable decision-making). They are deliberately a conversation hook, not a cookie-cutter spec. ▶ 10:42
• All four archetypes are built from the same small set of ingredients — screens, camera bars, microphones, multi-camera systems — to cut points of failure and give confidence in a five-to-six-year-plus lifecycle: 'right on day one and still good at day a hundred'. ▶ 18:51
• An internal design capability was created this year: user requirements must be agreed with the business before design progresses, then an in-house designer produces visual room designs and detailed schematics that partners deliver against, rather than outsourcing design to a supplier. ▶ 20:55
• Flexibility across delivery partners depends on service maturity — a documented hierarchy of policies, procedures and SOPs measured on a daily basis — so partners work to Haleon's standards instead of their own. ▶ 21:55
• Consolidating on one ecosystem makes proactive monitoring viable at 450 rooms; the aspiration is self-healing rooms or at least out-of-hours intervention so the room is ready for the business day, since a raised ticket already means the user was impacted. ▶ 27:02
• Digital employee experience is being scored across services and locations — meeting-room signalling, network call quality, ticket volumes and walk-ups to tech lounges — so an out-of-bounds spike at a given office drives operational focus. ▶ 29:34

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

Listen: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Other platforms