Support Timelines for Android Teams Rooms and Phones - a Customer Perspective

Dan Hall, Global IT Collaboration Solution Owner at a large manufacturing company gives us a view on using Android-based Phones and Rooms for Microsoft Teams and support timeline considerations.

• The impact of an upcoming Microsoft infrastructure change on older Android phones and Teams Rooms
• The need for organisations to understand the support timelines of Android-based devices
• The importance of working closely with OEMs to understand their devices, chipsets and support timelines
• Considering using SIP phones for common area phones and BYOD

Thanks to Luware, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support.

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Welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast. You know, we like to have the customer perspective on the podcast. And this was a really good conversation with Dan Hall. Who is IT Collaboration Owner at a manufacturing company. We go into a little bit of the history of his experience, moving from a standard telephony system to Teams and we also got into Android and Android lifecycle and the impacts on choosing room devices and phones and even a little bit of SIP devices and BYoD. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Many thanks to Dan for making the time, and also many thanks to Luware, the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. Everything we're doing at Empowering Cloud. I hope you enjoy the show. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Exciting one. This week I've got Dan Hall. Dan Hall works at a little bit of different company I typically talk to kind of knowledge worker. He type companies. Dan Hall is IT Collaboration Solution Owner at a large manufacturing organization, Global Reach, I think. Dan your is your HQ London Office in London, but, headquarters is actually based out of Florida. okay. Cool. So you and your you're around just outside London, aren't you? That's right. I'm down on the south coast. Awesome. Well, thanks for reaching out. You reached out via the newsletter. and we ended up chatting. So I appreciate you reaching out and, coming on the show. So maybe you give, give the audience a little bit of background about you and your role and, you'll kind of Lync, Skype, now Teams journey as well. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, yeah, initially we was, using we had the on prem, on premise, via PBX, and everybody had desk phones and was using Skype for business and I was looking to modernize that. And, yeah, I think, journey started about 2018 towards 2019, and we chose Teams as our platform. So we was moving away from on premise devices to, to cloud giving people headsets. But being in a manufacturing organization, of course, we still got common area phones. And the big requirement of that was that the phones needed push buttons. So we picked a particular, desk phone that is, team certified that had push buttons. And, yeah, we carried on that experience. But, yeah. Since then, Teams is our collaboration platform of choice. So I look after all the all of Microsoft Teams and everything that comes with it. So that includes voice, conference rooms, etc.. So you cover both in some organizations of split, like there's like the kind of collaboration governance, data bits of Teams. And then there's the UC rooms, devices bit, but your role spans both sides. It yeah, it's quite broad. It's that the whole suite. But we have particular departments that look out of the particular sections of that, but, it's made me that oversees it. how was the journey again? I talk to lots of kind of, you know, Bank Finserv legal or manufacturing. I feel like you have more specific requirements. You mentioned IP phones, the different use cases. How was it going from a classic Avaya PBX to cloud and Teams phone? Well, I. Think I think the, the the biggest challenge was change management. because we came from, you know, simple messaging platform Skype for business. we have, desk phones on people's desks that are quite simple to use. And, we're kind of bringing all the functionality of Teams into play as well. So it's kind of like a big, a big change in going from a, a handset to a headset is, you know, it takes a little bit of adjustment to get to, but, you know, once you tackle that and then, you know, the capabilities pay off. And, you know, I say with pushing through, our journey, pre-COVID, it and then as soon as kind of like the Covid lockdowns, hit was close to the end of our implementation. So is in a, in a good place already. And it was quite interesting to see, you know, they adopt the the acceleration of adoption of the platform where, you know, we had the ability to move people out of the office where their customer services into, into homes and then carry on still working. Yeah, I think I think the, you know, the Covid period is when a lot of people realize the value of cloud and like, it wasn't it wasn't flawless like the big cloud providers had some scaling challenges as well. But the fact that you could be like, it's your problem now to suddenly go from 10% usage to 100% usage and we as internal IT don't have to worry about that was quite a blessing for a lot of people, I think. Yeah, revolutionize the way we work. Awesome. So so today your 100% Teams phone or as a some Avaya knocking around. No 100% Team Phone. We do have a fair amount of analog out there as well, which we've converted to, ATAs using media packs and then they've, they effectively connect back to the cloud that way. but, yeah, everything's, fully in the cloud. We do have, we still do have one SBC out there where we can't get cloud calling plans, but, as soon as that's available, that'll be, ripped out as well. Awesome, awesome. What about, we need to get approval about contact center. Is that, a different platform? No, I say we're we're fully Teams there as well. It's it's I would call it contacts into lights, I guess. we do have, as I mentioned, we've got customer services and, consumer services. we've managed to fully, fully put all of that into Teams. There is a little bit of, missing capability there, which looks like Microsoft are addressing very soon with the queues app. yeah. Where you can sort of see how many callers in the queue and things like that. that, that has been missing since they, we had Avaya. But yeah, it's looks like there, there are, there are options to cover those gaps. Yeah. They're putting a lot of effort into the keys app. So definitely for the for the price and the functionality that looks pretty interesting. I'm looking forward to that's coming out kind of August, September time. So we'll see how that lands with people. Yeah. We've been looking at the, the customer preview of that and been helping out with the developments, but, yeah, it should be GA anytime soon. Nice, nice, cool. So the primary thing we wanted to jump on and talk about on this pod was devices and Android and kind of life cycle for to get everybody up to speed whos listening to the pod we'll try to get this out relatively quickly. The Microsoft the changing some backend infrastructure, they're depreciating a particular service. and that has had a knock on effect on some of the old, Android based phones. so the phones that are out of support, will no longer work with relatively short notice knowing they wouldn't work, but it kind of sparks a bigger conversation. I think that's where we should start down about how Android works and how the life cycle works. And then you're very close is obviously with your devices. So where is the best place to start? Oh blimey. It's a story. That's yes, I guess really we'll start with by saying it's yeah, it's the end of June. That's Microsoft announced in the message center that they're going to be deprecation the deprecating, messaging services, for that would impact some of the older Teams devices running Android. And if you like us that, we're implementing Teams back in 2020, it's likely that those devices, are going to be impacted. And, you know, in, in the previous world when when you had on premise PBX and desk phones, you may not even have a like a life cycle refresh for a desk phone. A handset may be you run it till it breaks, or have at least maybe eight years until you think about, replacing them all. But, yeah, it's kind of, sparked a bit of a debate. This, so the, the message center articles that, they published in June initially said that, the service is going to depreciate end of July. So give us a very small amount of time to react. And we did react very quickly. they've since then, they've extended that deadline to end of September. But for us at least we've, we've gone ahead and replaced all of those phones that have been impacted. But, You're definitely not the only customer impacted, I'm talking to two other customers. kind of sparked off the back of our conversation who are going through the same cycle now. They've they've got devices. They they've known their end of certification. But like you say, the kind of traditional attitude around IP phones is they'll just tick along right, like, and that isn't the case here. Yeah, I actively stopped them working, and. That was kind of a view as well. So the up area, if you look on their website, it kind of alludes towards that. The phones will be ended of support in 2027. So that's that's the OEM saying that those support it up to a particular date. Even though their your end of sale or end of life. they, it specifies that there'll be some kind of support for, you know, at least five years after that date. So you kind of expect the device to carry on working. but, yeah, this particular message center article is going to effectively stop incoming, notifications to those phones. And, you know, if if you're a phone, you've got one job that. That's a pretty fundamental. Yeah. Scenario. Isn't that. So? Yeah. If you're a phone that's a bit of a bit of a problem if you can't receive calls. So yeah, you kind of weve had to quickly react and replace it with these devices just so we're covered. And this is the kind of, one of the challenges of an ecosystem philosophy. So Microsoft have many different vendors. You can build devices and they certify them. But Microsoft and that's great because it sparks innovation, price, competition, all that kind of stuff. But the way this works is the OEMs build a device, Microsoft give them the application, they certify the device, and when they certify for an Android device based on the OS, they put it on. So Android, you know, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, now 13. Microsoft's current stance is it's from the date of release of the Android OS for five years. The certification will last. So not based on when the device gets certified or when the OEM builds the device, but the build of Android is on it. So that means that although we say five years, if a device gets certified midway through that, so they get, you know, two and a half years in because they've built it and they or whatever, you've only got two and a half years, technically of certified support between the OEM and Microsoft. Now the device manufacturer can choose to put another version of Android on recertify and the clock starts again. but now the dependency for you as a customer is to understand is the OEM going to do that? Will they get through certification if the chip in the device capable of going to the next one, two versions of Android. So you have to be quite technical in your decision making here, and your understanding of the landscape to even work with an OEM. And a lot of see, you're quite deep on this, but like most customers are not as deep on this. They're just assuming I'm buying IP phones, they're certified Presumably they're going to go for years and years and years. Yeah, that's exactly the point. So if you you're, you know, when you are considering to purchase Android devices that run Teams it's quite a lot you got to look into. And it seems to be a lack of transparency and alignment between the OEM and, Microsoft say. But you you mentioned you got to figure out what the OEM support period is. You know, you've got to ideally know what chipset or system of a chip is that device which is not published. you need to know. Some OEM. Some. Well, yeah, some. Some less so. So you'd have to kind of sniff around that as well. And then on top of that, you got to know what version of Android that chip can go to, and also predicts what the future versions of Android that that system can run. And then you've got to also look at how long Microsoft will certify that version of Android too. So there's a lot to take in and a lot to understand when when choosing what you're going to be putting into your environment. Yeah. And then Microsoft do say they'll do two years kind of, best effort, ongoing support. So they anticipate they won't try and break them. And and to be fair to Microsoft, these older phones are Android eight and nine. So they have their five year plus two. But that sounds like they last seven years, but doesn't mean they do because people might have bought them. Technically, you could go and buy them in the last couple of years and and have had only had them for 24 months potentially. Yeah, that's that's the problem. I in the message center article it does say, you know, what do you need to prepare. And it says please review your current hardware inventory and identify devices that are reaching end of life or their certification expiration plan to upgrade these devices as soon as possible to ensure uninterrupted service. So if we now sort of switch from phones to conference rooms, which are a little bit more expensive, expect to get a fair amount of return on investment on these rooms. you know, if even in Microsoft Store right now you can purchase, conference room devices that yeah, we know that won't go beyond Android ten and that certification will expire next year. So, you mentioned there, which is true, which, Microsoft say, though, you know, after certification ends, they'll support their own, best endeavors kind of basis. But do you want to run that risk where, you know, we're currently seeing now that Microsoft depreciation the service which is going to break some devices. Do you want to run that risk of having non-certified devices in your environment. it's something that's people need to figure out. Definitely. So conference room is, is a really good conversation because again, bring everybody up to speed. It's the same philosophy on the Microsoft team rooms for Android. They're running Android OS. It's the same certification timeline, same certification dates. But as you say, you could now be spending multiple thousands and up depending on what you buy. know again, the people in the AV space would typically assume those things run for years and years and years. But depending on when you hit and what your OEMs doing and the chipset, particularly if you're buying it, you know, if you're actively uninformed, I have seen a customer get a really good deal on a whole load of like towards the end of their life cycle bars. They're like, great, we've got these super cheap. I'm like, yeah, but you know that they're not going very far. So yeah. Is it worth it? Yeah. Because you've got to now also ask the OEMs when buying these. You know what. What's their commitment to support their the newer versions of Android. You know, will they release a new firmware of a new version of Android if the device can support it? it's it's those questions that you need to ask now. Yeah. And that puts them in a difficult spot sometimes because technically it's the Android open source project that chooses which chips are supported. So like, they can't absolutely guarantee they can have a rough idea based on the chip they chose in the timeline. So if you as a customer, which is what I would do if I was a customer, I'm buying a thousand of these devices. I need a guarantee they're going to last it, but they can't really trick that. They can give. They can de-risk it. And I do see some of the OEMs doing things like guaranteeing swap out. So they're like if for whatever reason it doesn't happen, we'll do a swap out. You still got a project there, but at least you've got the kit covered. but yeah, it does make the conversation slightly harder. Yeah. I think that like I say, that needs to be better alignment with the OEMs and Microsoft and to figure out what the life expectancy of, of products you're buying have. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are things moving there. Nothing really took away at this point. But with the, depth, the Microsoft devices ecosystem platform, Microsoft are getting into the Android OS game. So that's them taking the Android open source project and baking in their own, operating system around Android. It still has the same Android challenges of chipset support like any other Android, so it doesn't necessarily change the parameters in that respect. It might be interesting to see if that helps Microsoft and the OEM work closer together to say we're jointly committing to this timeline. Potentially. Yeah, I hope that does help this particular problem. Yeah. If they can support an Android version and kind of like freeze it to some extent because they can either be they're going to be owning that code to some degree. If they can still provide security patches, for example, and have it running on older devices. And yeah, that's to be a, the way forward. But who knows if that's going to solve that problem there. Yeah. And or potentially make it easier for the OEM to jump versions because it's a big project for the OEM to take on taking the Android 11. Typically what the OEMs do is they'll skip a version as well because there's no sense in them. There's no customer value, particularly jumping from Android 10 to 11. There might be some kind of minor features, but it's a big project for them to build it, test it, patch it, push it. So they might go. If they can. They'll go 9 to 11 or 10 to 12. Yeah. and that's why we see current, you know, fairly new, devices on the market, which is still, you know, they're running Android ten. Yeah. Yeah. Because they'll just they're just hang on that until they have to go up to and they'll try and jump straight as high as they can go. Basically. Yeah. So Dan, you were mentioning this has put you into kind of an interesting conversation, both on the phones and on the rooms front on the phones front looking at potentially we've also got the SIP Gateway and Teams world. So do you go standards based SIP phones that are compatible with SIP gateway because there are new SIP phones. you obviously miss out on some of the Teams features there, but does that give you a different life cycle? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So we've been using SIP gateway pretty much as soon as it was, it was launched. because as I've mentioned, you know, most of these phones are common area and we just want a basic phone with buttons. So SIP is a perfect candidate for that scenario. And yeah, the longevity. Yeah, that kind of takes the Android operating system out of the equation and then down to literally just, you know, will Microsoft allow registration of these devices. Yes. Great. And then it's save it to the the OEM to say we'll support it for ten years. I say. So then then it does become again, the phone becomes a bit of more of a consumable item. You just replace it when it breaks. Yeah. Have you, have you asked the OEMs explicitly what their support timelines are for their SIP phones, are they giving you that kind of timeline? Yeah, some of them do. Yeah. Awesome. And then rooms like BYoD has become less of a, an evil word in Microsoft. Like now they kind of acknowledge that that is a scenario for some use cases in their world. Obviously, Microsoft Teams Room is still the premier experience upgrades for other scenarios, but you've been thinking internally about potentially is there use cases because again, BYoD takes away that tight Android support timeline. It's yeah, something definitely worth exploring. So, you know, our philosophy in the past has always been we want our rooms as simple as possible. Don't need to bring a device. And you can just walk into the meeting and press the join button. That's a great experience. The end user and everybody loves it. But yeah, if we're looking at these rooms are quite expensive and if those lifecycle terms are going to be reduced, then it's worth exploring different options in this space. I just feel like we're getting a little bit of a step back in technology here. You know, you have to bring your laptop in and plug it in. and we'll say with the phones as well, we go, you know, Teams phones with the full experience to just push buttons. And it's fine in most cases. But, it does feel like it's a bit of a step back on the technology. From what? What about Microsoft Teams rooms on windows? Because obviously the timelines are slightly different. Have you considered that is form factor a factor that you're. Yeah. initial rooms, you know, it was it was only windows back then and yeah, they, they, they, they run well and we are replacing some of those rooms already because, you know, getting towards five years now, but, yeah, as soon as we introduced Android, it was kind of clear that this is kind of the way forward. it's a much easier to manage, the devices. You don't have many loads of cables that are plug it into a computer. It's just a simple bar. You hang on the wall, plug a screen in. Pretty much off you go. so yeah, the ease and and the barriers to entry with Android seem like, well, for us, for example, is, is the way forward and with moving away from Windows to Android. But, now we have to kind of rethink, what's what's our life cycle term for for the conference rooms? And can these devices, support that? that's good to understand. So for people listening, like I can see some takeaways here, there's no silver bullet or answer here. But being aware of when you're purchasing these things, how Microsoft support timeline works, and then working with your OEM or distribution to understand what was the OEM committing to or estimating what's their support timeline, what what do they think they're going to get out of the chipset? really important to understand because, you know, and what the business your, you know, your team, accepting of is, I definitely hear people now saying we're expecting three year, five years is acceptable for a refresh. But walking in, knowing that's true, as opposed to being surprised. Yeah. Another thing as well is, make sure to check these messaging, articles and make sure you don't have any, devices, especially phones that could be impacted by this because you need to react. And another thing to point out as well as, you know, it says that these phones need to be on a, a quite a new Teams app version. So if those phones have not been receiving updates for a little while in Teams admin center, the phones will say that they're all healthy and up to date, but they're not going to be able to take this newer version of the Teams app. So yeah, people want there. So yeah, that's. A really that's a really good highlight that I hadn't seen. I hadn't I haven't got a tenant running the older phones, but they it's not like they were on the tenant in the Teams admin center flashing saying we can't update because there is up to date as they can be, but they're not going any further. And that's the gap. So yeah, I'm sure that will catch people out. And you're right, the message center I unfortunately I well, we've got a few customers and message center isn't front of mind for some of them in terms of Teams. But these really important messages around also around things like direct routing, get lots of certificate changes and impacts there that people can easily miss if they're not careful. That's a really good tip. Great. Well, thanks for jumping on Dan. hopefully we've helped some people out at least highlighting, the awareness for this stuff. and maybe I'll, I'm going to revisit you is okay because you're on this BYoD experiment at the moment. All kind of considerations. So maybe, when you come some thoughts there, we'll do a show about the pros and cons of BYoD from your point of view. Yeah, obviously something we're exploring. And, I've got a laundry list of, requirements that I would like to have for a BYoD experience. And yeah, struggling to find the right solution right now. All right. Well, that's the teaser, the BYoD show, because either you'll come to a conclusion and you'll pick something, or you'll decide that there aren't quite the right requirements. But either way, that will be interesting. Sure. Brilliant. All right. Thanks for jumping on Dan, Really appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.