Sharing Audio Content during Microsoft Teams Meetings

Last Updated on June 14, 2020 by GrahamWalsh

Background

I met with a customer last week who was disappointed about not hearing the audio in a Microsoft Teams. This occurs in a meeting when they plugged their cable into a Microsoft Teams Room System (MTR).

Chris Hoard wrote a great blog about sharing videos in Microsoft Teams meetings. I won’t duplicate the post he’s done, so here’s the link but I will expand a little when in the meeting room.

In Chris’s above post, he talks about how to share your desktop client and share the system audio. This means that you can share that YouTube or Microsoft Stream video, or any other video clip you may want to discuss during your call.

MTR Devices and Content Sharing

When it comes to Microsoft Teams Rooms, there are a few options to share content. First off is HDMI that is directly connected to the NUC. This is usually represented on the tabletop. Users plug in the cable and most users expect audio to be presented via HDMI. When the MTR system is not in a call, it will pass the audio through to the speakers, so this is all ok. When in a Teams Meeting, as the audio would be processed via the Microsoft Teams App on the MTR, as of today this is not supported, hence no content audio will be sent to the far end. One thing to note is that the local users will hear the local audio content being played on the installed sound system.

Scheduling a Meeting

The other way to present during a meeting is to attach a PowerPoint to the meeting invite and then share that content. To do this, when creating a new meeting, simply attach your PPT file. The Office Online Server (OOS or previously WAC server) will render this. You can see the attachment below in the screenshot.

Presenting during a Meeting

When you join the Teams Meeting, you can then share content from the Desktop app or the Web app (using Edge Chromium in my example). You also have the option of sharing the System Audio, meaning any app or webpage, so you don’t need to embed it into PowerPoint.

You can then control the PowerPoint slides from the bottom left. Note that you cannot control them from the MTR when in Teams mode. If you joined a Skype for Business meeting, it did have the controls available (just like the Surface Hub).

Here is a video overview of how it works in action. You will hear the Teams client ringing in the video as that is embedded into the PowerPoint.

So there we have it, a few ways to share audio within a Teams Meeting. Remember you can join a Teams Meeting from your client as control only, so your device does not transmit audio or video, just presentation. I covered how to do this here. I also created a video on Proximity Join below.

Any questions, feel free to ask.