This post provides on overview on Microsoft Teams Rooms managed services. To start, let’s begin with the basics. Microsoft Team Rooms are systems and services to enable small to large conference and meeting rooms for Team meetings. If you have a meeting room with a display but no video conferencing or collaboration system you might want to add Teams Room devices to easily transition the old-fashioned meeting room to a interactive and hybrid work meeting room using Microsoft Teams.

What are Microsoft Team Rooms?

As mentioned above, Team Rooms are a set of devices and services to make a room capable of doing Team meetings. There are many certified devices available for this purpose as you can find on the Microsoft page for certified Teams Meeting Room devices. On the page you can filter to find what suits your room requirements best to make a decision on which devices you want to buy and deploy. The below screenshot is just a snapshot, meaning that the page, the devices, the prices etc. are subject to change at any time.

What are managed services for Microsoft Team Rooms?

A while ago I wrote an article on how to manage Microsoft Team Rooms (MTRs). Since then many updates and changes were introduced to add more and more features to Teams devices in general. In the article I described how you can managed MTRs by yourself using the Microsoft Teams Admin Center (TAC) in the first place. You also have other options for managing MTRs, like XIO Cloud for Crestron devices or Yealink’s Management Cloud Service (YMCS) for Yealink devices. By introducing a Microsoft managed service for Microsoft Team Rooms you get the following features depending on its availability:

• cloud-based management service
• cloud-based monitoring service
• cloud-based update service
• keeping devices operational to provice a great and stead user experience for MTR users

It is a proactive and scalable service to suite your needs for your MTRs. It decreases the time that you need to spend with the tasks to keep everything running and operational. Microsoft utilizes its knowledge and capabilities with the management of endpoints with software, machine learning and intelligent automation.

Companies benefit of the service with the following:

• Room planning and rollout
• Monitoring and troubleshooting
• Updated management
• Insights and recommendations
• Compliance and certifications
• Customer support 24x7x365 by a dedicated Microsoft Teams Rooms managed service Service Operation Center (SOC)
• Inventory management
• Room enrollment
• Room administration
• Integration [with customer-hosted Service Now]
• for supported devices
• in supported regions

For details regarding support services please see and follow the links at the bottom to read more.

How much is it?

Prices are subject to change at any time and are just mentioned here for your convince and indication. If you visit the the Microsoft Teams Room website it says that a Managed MTR is 50 $ per device and month.

Who’s deploying the MTR hardware?

It’s you or a Microsoft partner you might want to help you with it.

In my experiencing deploying Team Rooms is a (mostly) straightforward process although the hardware setup should not be underestimated in regards of time to deploy it in a room and make the room’s look appealing. Unpacking everything can consume some time.

You might want to make only the components you need visible, so cables and wires should be invisible and hidden and not interfere with the interior of the room etc. That’s why you should plan sufficient time especially if you deploy Teams Room hardware the first time.

Depending on your devices you might have little or a lot of packaging. Most of the time I had a lot of packaging. [Off-topic] Maybe that’s something where vendors could still work on to not waste resources and wrap each cable and plug in a separat plastic bag. That’s not very sustainable and economical, in my personal opinion. I also recognize that argument that it is like it is because it supplied and delivered to the vendor this way, also protects the components and signals the buyer it’s new. [/Off-topic] Also a reason to plan sufficient time for the deployment to clean up the room if you unpacked everything directly in the room.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Managing a few MTRs is not a big deal and big effort, in my opinion, especially if you have the people, systems and resources to do so. If you lack the people and resources to managed MTRs and devices in your collaboration and communication landscape the managed service could help you to overcome the lack of people and resources to do the job. However, it is not a low price for the managed service but you get a lot for it, in my opinion. At the end of the day it’s as always a decision where you have to take several aspects for your company into consideration and take all relevant aspects into account. Microsoft’s managed service for MTRs is one service but there are Microsoft partners out there which also can help you to deploy and operate your MTRs as well in order to provide a great user experience in your hybrid workplace and meeting environment.

Update (March 2022)

Based on a question in the comments I like to add a recent roadmap information regarding a new API for devices. Microsoft announced a Teams Device Management Graph APIs available in Preview version. The API provides “access to information about the Teams devices, options to manage them, and enable easy integration with other workflows.”

Additional resources

• Manage Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) – Erik’s Blog (erik365.blog)
• Microsoft Teams Rooms Packages and Systems | Teams devices
• Microsoft Teams Rooms managed service – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs
• Microsoft Teams Rooms | Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Teams Rooms managed service – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs [supported regions]
• Microsoft 365 Roadmap Teams Rooms
• Microsoft 365 admin center MC336852
• Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 90173 Microsoft Graph: Teams Device management Graph APIs (Preview)