Last Updated on July 1, 2020 by GrahamWalsh
You may have noticed a message on your Microsoft Teams Room saying Add this Room to a meeting with your personal device. What does this mean? Well, it means you can start a call from your mobile device. There are a few ways to use this feature, so let’s look at each method.
Android Mobile
With the Teams client on an Android device, I simply press the Join button to join my meeting. I can then press the People icon in the top right and I have a few options now. If I select Add a room (it is using the icon as the front of the room screen), it will then show me the available rooms and even nearby rooms.
Now once we have pressed Add a room, we see this screen to select which room we would like. Since I selected the nearby room of Flex Teams Room 02, it has put it in the Add box. I now just need to press the Tick on the top right. The system will then dial out to the Microsoft Teams Room.
Here is the touch panel showing the incoming call. It also informs you who is calling, so you don’t call the wrong room.
iOS (iPad Pro)
This is my testing on the iPad. The same starting point, launch a Teams Meeting with the Join button from my Teams calendar. On the pre-join screen, I can tap the down arrow on Join Now and I get two options. I selected Join and add a room.
I then get the list of rooms available and also I get Nearby Rooms. The same method on the iPad, I tap the nearby device of Flex Teams Room 02 and press the Join button in the top right.
The system then receives an incoming call like before.
Windows Desktop
So the Windows Desktop app behaves slightly differently. It can use the Bluetooth proximity feature. First up, join your scheduled meeting and you will have the pre-join screen. You can press the Add a room icon.
Once you have selected that, you will be given a choice of which room to add. Once you select a room, it will start to dia l out to that room.
If you wait a few seconds, you will see a different option on the pre-join screen. It will automatically find that room and you just click to select it and it will dial out to the room.
Now what happens, the room system will automatically answer the call. This is a new feature in release 4.3.23.0 or higher of the Microsoft Teams Room software. You also must enable this too in the settings as per below.
The auto-accept of proximity-based calls seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes it works and some times it does not. Not had a chance to understand why but some others on the Microsoft Tech Community are seeing this behavior as well (can’t find the exact post either). In my testing for this blog, it worked on the third attempt. When it fails, it rings the room as normal.
Below is a video of the Proximity Join feature
Any questions, feel free to drop them below.