The documents my team produces aren’t solo efforts. When I build a presentation, for example, I’ll leave placeholders for colleagues to fill in, ask people to review, and maybe work with a designer. We have great collaboration tools at Cisco with Webex Teams, and with the new approach to bring Webex Teams with you wherever you work, I can use one platform in one place without losing my train of thought…

Cisco IT’s Collaboration strategy is to mirror the Webex Teams approach to building bridges between team collaboration and other solutions for a continuous workflow. With Office 365, we continue with this theme, so you can efficiently collaborate whether you’re out and about on your phone in Webex Teams or writing a document on your laptop in Word. As “Customer Zero” for the Webex Teams and Microsoft Office 365 integration, Cisco IT is trying out different use cases to give customers the benefit of our real-world experience.

See how you can use Cisco Webex Meetings within Microsoft Teams. Add to Watchlist. The News: Today Microsoft and Cisco are announcing a partnership that enables Cisco’s Webex video devices to connect to the Microsoft Teams meeting services in multiple ways. First, Cisco Webex will introduce an interop solution that will be certified as a Microsoft Cloud Video Interop (CVI) offering to allow Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices to join Microsoft Teams.

We’re introducing the Webex Teams integration into Office 365 to Cisco employees in three phases.

Phase 1 – Email and Calendar Migration

We’ve worked on enabling Cisco collaboration in Outlook for years, and this historically has been a challenge in a mixed environment, we have both Macs and PCs and we never seem to get everything working on both – today though, we have all the features on all the platforms integrated with Webex Teams. Click to Call, Click to Chat, and Presence all work in Outlook on Mac and PC and we enabled this as we migrated mailboxes to O365. We’ve also integrated Webex Teams into O365 calendar to get employees to their meetings faster. It’s all part of our continual effort to keep our everyday tools modern, user friendly, and making the collaboration experience seamless – after all, we are a global company and a lot of our teams span multiple time zones.

Phase 2 – Co-authoring and Co-editing

Say I want to edit an Office document that someone added to a Webex Teams space. Before, I’d have to download the document, open it, edit, save, and upload the new version to the space. Did I download the latest version? Not sure. We’ve made life much simpler by integrating Webex Teams with OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Now, I can add an Office document to a Webex Teams space from OneDrive using the file storage and sharing integration in Webex Teams. I have the option to grant editing rights to those who have prior access to my document or to open it up to everyone in the Webex Teams space.

Once the document is uploaded onto OneDrive, no matter where I work, it’s the same document, whether I am in Webex Teams, or using any app in the Office Suite. The experience is seamless – and I don’t even need to re-upload. Co-authoring and editing are a game-changer for us – especially when you can use these tools in our real-time video meetings. Our users are pretty excited about it, and it’s integrated right into Webex Teams. Watch this video to learn more about this experience.

Phase 3 – Social Collaboration

This final step is currently in progress. If I’m in Word editing a colleague’s document, I feel comfortable making little changes like correcting a date. But other changes require some conversation first—for example, “In paragraph 3, you said ‘service’ but I think you meant ‘architecture.’ Right?” So, we wrote an add-in to the Office 365 menu that creates a Webex Teams side panel, allowing you to chat directly from within the document. It’s handy for keeping all conversations about a document in the same place. Plus, the conversation is saved in real time in my Webex Teams, so I can stay in the loop even if I am on the go and don’t have the document open. It’s another win for collaboration, and ultimately user productivity. I’m not sure how many minutes I have spent searching emails for documents, but now I don’t have to, and neither do our employees.

Next up: Adding Collaboration to our Other Cloud Services

In integrating Webex Teams and Office 365, we built what we’re calling the Secure Digital Experience platform. In addition to collaboration, it brings together Duo Security, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and our eStore (so that we can make sure we don’t exceed our license count). Once we’ve finished the Office 365 rollout, we plan to connect the platform to other cloud services, including IBM Connections, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

How did we manage this massive overhaul of tools with minimal user downtime? Migrating 118,000 mailboxes is not easy, but you can learn more about it from my colleagues Kelly Conway and Caroline Te Aika.

The platform has an interesting security angle. Since email contains confidential information, we allow access to Office 365 only from trusted devices. But who wants to wait for a VPN connection every time they check their email away from the office? You can read more about our security considerations here, in a blog by my colleague Dave Jones and myself.

Questions? Ideas? Please share in the comment box.

After you have chosen your Cloud Video Interop partner(s), you will need to plan your deployment, get set up with provisioning details and partner tenant key, and consent to the video interop app in your organization. The following diagram outlines the process.

Plan

See Cloud Video Interop for Microsoft Teams for information about identifying a partner or partners to use in your organization.

Cisco Microsoft Teams Interop

To plan for user based/concurrent/site wide enablement:

• Pick a deployment model/hosted model for your use
• Select the license plan ideal for your organization.
• Plan for capacity of VMs is you are hosting your video infrastructure.

Configure

To configure Cloud Video Interop, follow these steps.

1. Obtain configuration info from the partner/partners you have chosen (tenant key, appIds…). You can use one or more video interop partners in your organization

2. Ensure that your network is configured correctly. Configure your standards-based video firewall for perimeter network traversal to support. For example:

   • Cisco VCS-e
   • Polycom RPAD

3. Configure integrated rooms with exchange and OTD. In most cases, additional relay would need to be set up and configured in your environment.

Provision

The tenant key will be the dial out to the partner service. In the following example, 813878896@t.plcm.vc is the tenant key.

You will need to execute the following cmdlets to provision the tenant key, and also enable select users or your whole organization to create meetings with video interop coordinates.

• Get-CsTeamsVideoInteropServicepolicy:Microsoft provides pre-constructed policies for each of our supported partners that allow you to designate which partner(s) to use for cloud video interop.

  This cmdlet allows you to identify the pre-constructed policies that you can use in your organization. You can assign this policy to one or more of your users leveraging the Grant-CsTeamsVideoInteropServicePolicy cmdlet.

• Grant-CsTeamsVideoInteropServicePolicy:The Grant-CsTeamsVideoInteropServicePolicy cmdlet allows you to assign a pre-constructed policy for use in your organization or assign the policy to specific users.

• New-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider:Use the New-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider to specify information about a supported CVI partner your organization would like to use.

• Set-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider:Use the Set-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider to update information about a supported CVI partner your organization uses.

• Get-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider:Get all of the providers that have been configured for use within the organization.

• Remove-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider:Use Remove-CsVideoInteropServiceProvider to remove all provider information about a provider that your organization no longer uses.

Consent

You will need to provide permission consent for the video teleconferencing devices (VTCs) to join your organizations meetings via the partner service. This consent link will also be provided by your partner.

When these steps are complete, the users who are individually enabled via the Grant cmdlet above, or all of the users in the organization if the tenant is enabled, will have VTC coordinates in all the Teams meetings that they schedule. Any VTC can join these meetings via those coordinates.

Schedule

Cisco Cloud Video Interop For Microsoft Teams

Cloud Video Interop Microsoft Teams

Next, schedule Teams meeting with video interop coordinates. The enabled user can schedule teams meetings via:

• Teams client desktop and mobile

Join

Microsoft Teams And Cisco Webex Interoperability

You can join Teams meetings with your VTC devices in the following ways:

Cisco Webex Microsoft Teams Interop

• IVR (Interactive voice Response)
  • You can dial in to the partner's IVR using the tenantkey@domain.
  • Once you are in the partner IVR, you will be prompted to enter the VTC conferenceId, which will then connect you to the Teams meeting.
• Direct dial
  • You can directly dial into the Teams meeting without interacting with the partner’s IVR by using the direct dial feature using the full string of tenantkey.VTC ConferenceId@domain.
• One-touch dial
  • If you have an integrated Teams room, you can use the one-touch dial capabilities offered by your partner (without needing to type any dial string).

Microsoft Teams Skype Interop

Finally, engage with Teams users in your meetings using audio, video, and content sharing.