How To Collaborate Across Different Platforms With Direct Guest Join

In a significant step towards interoperability, Direct Guest Join allows users to easily join third-party online meetings with one click. It lets you streamline meetings with remote participants by providing a reliable way to connect via the cloud with a single "join" button. Recently, this feature has been introduced by Microsoft Teams to connect with Zoom rooms.

To connect, all you have to do is:

1. Enable third-party meetings in your platform’s settings.
2. Invite a Teams room or Zoom room to your meeting
3. In one touch, the Teams service will join a Zoom call and vice versa.

Connecting Zoom and Microsoft, Direct Guest Join brings a new level of flexibility, ease, and scalability. It expands hybrid teams' boundaries and breaks down communication and collaboration barriers.

How does Direct Guest Join streamline communications across platforms?

• No wasted meeting minutes: Take back the five or 10 minutes necessary. It set up a meeting or troubleshoots connection issues and collaborates faster.
• Even for remote participants: Forget about asking remote participants or external stakeholders to join a Zoom Meeting or Microsoft Teams meeting from their computer to reliably connect. You can simply join with the click of a button from the Zoom Room.
• The functionality of conference rooms: Give your meeting attendees a simple and dynamic in-room collaboration experience. It leverages your video conferencing room system with the ability to call into Zoom or Team meetings.
• No extra costs: Users will not need to buy extra licenses or third-party services. 

How to join a Microsoft Teams meeting using Direct Guest Join from a Zoom Room

1. Invite a Zoom Room to a Microsoft Teams meeting by directly adding the calendar resource associated with the Zoom Room to the Teams invite. You can also forward a Teams calendar invitation received from a third party to the calendar resource associated with the Zoom Room. Alternatively, a user can cut and paste the entire body of a meeting invitation from an external third party into a new meeting invite.
2. Once the calendar receives the meeting invite. Zoom room will display the meeting on its upcoming meeting list with a Join option on the controller.
3. Now, double-check the steps above or see the troubleshooting section if you see "Join by Audio instead.

• Note: Forwarding the invite may need modification of settings in Microsoft Office 365.

4. Click Join on the controller. The Zoom Room will connect to the Teams meeting.

• Note: The joining process will take longer than joining a Zoom meeting.

5. After joining, the following in-meeting controls are available:

• Mute Microphone
• Start/Stop Video
• Volume
• Leave meeting 
• Send problem report
• Rejoin meeting
• Share content
• Zoom Rooms native controls (if configured)

The Zoom Room’s default camera and camera control mode, microphone, and speaker will be used during the meeting and cannot be changed mid-call. The Microsoft Teams meeting will only appear on the first display of the Zoom Room. A second or third display will not show other Microsoft Teams meeting participants or shared content.

Enabling direct guest-join from a Microsoft Teams Room device

First, you’ll want to configure the device’s mailbox. So, it can process calendar invites for third-party meetings:

• Connect to Exchange OnlinePowerShell, either with basic authentication or multi-factor authentication.
• If you don’t know the User Principal Name (UPN) of the Microsoft Teams Room mailbox, get it by running this command:

• Find the room mailbox for your Teams Rooms device and identify its UPN.

• Run this command (replace <UserPrincipalName> with the UPN you found:

Next, you need to make sure the meeting join URLs come through properly.

You can add the third-party meeting service URLs as well. It is an allow-list for ATP Safe Links (also known as the “do not rewrite” list).

Make sure these are trusted URLs. Hence, you can get the complete list of allowable URLs by contacting the third-party service.

Access the allow list from the Safe Links policy in your Microsoft 365 Defender portal. Then, add Zoom URLs. These are the most common ones:

• *.zoom.us*
• *.zoom.com*
• *.zoomgov.com*

Finally, add the username and email address associated with the device’s room mailbox. A few ways exist, but the simplest method is via the device's touchscreen.

1. Select "More...” on the Teams Room device.
2. Select Settings and enter the device administrator username and password.
3. Go to the Meetings tab and select Zoom.
4. Select Join with room info to join meetings with the username and email address associated with the room mailbox.
5. Or, select Join with custom info and enter a different username and email address.
6. Select Save and exit. Your device will restart.

That’s it. You’re all set!

Direct Guest Join Collaboration for Android

Teams Rooms on Android offer Direct Guest Join as well. A one-touch experience that allows users to join a third-party meeting from their Teams Rooms as easily as they can join teams hosted in Teams. This experience helps reduce friction when users join calls from external partners or clients who may not use the same meeting provider.

However, Direct Guest Join for Android began on May 25th. Moreover, it is already being supported by Poly, Logitech, and Yealink Teams-certified devices. Today, the collaboration is available as such:

• Zoom Rooms for Windows version 5.6 or higher
• Zoom Rooms for Appliances version 5.10.3 or higher
• Supported on DTEN ME, Logitech Rally Bar, Logitech Rally Bar Mini, Neat Bar, Neat Bar Pro, Neat Board, Poly X30, Poly X50, Poly X70, Poly G7500, Yealink A20, and Yealink A30.
• Mac version 5.6 or higher for Zoom Rooms.
• Zoom Rooms controller for Android or iOS version 5.6 or higher
• Zoom Rooms controller for Windows version 5.1 or higher

Future apps looking for collaboration

Microsoft Teams is not only the platform that streamlines meetings with remote participants and allows users to join third-party meetings with one click. Google Meet also introduced a new interoperability feature for Zoom in 2022. It enables users to join Google Meet meetings from Zoom Rooms as well as Zoom Meetings from Google Meet hardware. The feature could be used via calendar invite or by entering the meeting code on both platforms. This amazing move by Google will benefit organizations connecting conference rooms to partners, customers, and other groups that use different conference platforms internally. It’s incredible when two rivals work together for the good of their users. Users with Zoom Rooms and Google Meet devices will be able to communicate seamlessly. With this feature, Meet and Zoom Rooms participants can participate in meetings.

But this isn’t the first time Google Meet has united with other video conferencing platforms. It had earlier announced similar bi-directional interoperability with Cisco Webex devices called Pexip. The Pexip Google Meet interoperability enabled users to join Meet calls through third-party video conferencing devices. Moreover, Google has also announced Companion Mode. It assigns devices to breakout rooms and quickly frames in-room participants.