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Microsoft has recently announced that they have created alliances between Zoom, Cisco, and themselves for room systems interoperability. Participants within this alliance will be able to use this new solution to utilize each other’s platforms on their own room system devices, allowing a fully collaborative meeting experience. 

From the blog of Ilya Bukshteyn, Partner Director, Teams Devices, Microsoft:
“…even if my company has fully standardized on Microsoft Teams meetings, one of our partners or customers may still send us an occasional invite for a WebEx or Zoom meeting. Rather than join that meeting on my laptop or mobile device, I’d like to use all of the rich audio and video capabilities of my Microsoft Teams Rooms to also join that meeting.
 
“While the native meetings experience on each of these room systems will always remain richer and more full-featured, we [Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom] all agree that having the ability to easily and simply join the occasional non-native meeting on our room systems is a great thing for our customers. We also expect to expand the list of meeting services and room systems which implement this new web-based approach to non-native meetings as we move further into 2020.”

It is important to note that Microsoft holds the relevant patents for this type of support, and therefore, this relationship will only exist between Microsoft and the other companies, respectfully. Zoom and Cisco WebEx have not announced similar support between each other’s systems. 

Because of this, you will get the ability to one-touch join non-native meetings through Microsoft Teams. However, there is the downside that this experience and functionality will be very limited due to WebRTC based web clients.

Below, you can see where the three clients have posted their own announcements/how they will work within their own clients. 

Microsoft:

 

You can see it in action at this link, at the 30-minute mark.

https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/83194?source=sessions

 

Zoom:

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/11/04/zoom-rooms-direct-guest-join-microsoft-teams-meetings/

 

Cisco:

In this video, which is at the Microsoft Ignite conference, the experience is shown briefly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKXOIqWrX5E

 

And an announcement was made via the Cisco blog, which can be found here https://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/cisco-and-microsoft-have-come-together-to-deliver-a-better-user-experience