The always anticipated Microsoft Ignite conference is among us—and as we highlighted yesterday, BlueJeans by Verizon is participating in this week's virtual conference in full force.
To kick things off, today we announced new enhancements to our BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams solution (BlueJeans Gateway). As organizations look to advance their hybrid workplace initiatives, the BlueJeans Gateway gives organizations the ability to extend their Microsoft Teams collaboration capabilities—regardless of where employees are located.
With Microsoft Teams reaching 115 million daily active users (DAU) in October 2020, IT and business leaders are now tasked with accelerating their approach for ensuring business continuity and Microsoft Teams connectivity for employees once office doors open back up. With more than 1 billion cloud-connected room system minutes supporting thousands of different room system configurations, the Microsoft-certified BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams is a pure SaaS solution that enables customers to use their existing H.323 and SIP-based endpoints to join Microsoft Teams meetings from any conference room or huddle space.
To date, close to 650 customers, such as Pernod Ricard, have chosen BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams as their cloud video interop (CVI) solution of choice for connecting their existing hardware infrastructure to join Microsoft Teams meetings. Layering onto BlueJeans’ existing rich feature set, today’s Gateway updates include greater CVI management controls to further simplify and enhance the room-based Microsoft Teams meeting experience.
  • Auto-Join: Ensuring compliance with Covid-related protocols, Gateway-enabled room systems can now choose to automatically join Microsoft Teams meetings without the touch of any buttons. This hands-free option provides an added degree of confidence for employees as they return to the office. If there is an existing meeting going on, the new meeting will not start unless prompted.
  • 1080p HD Video: With add-on support for 1080p HD video quality, customers can experience high quality video from their room systems using their existing hardware.
  • Video Quality Enhancements: Reduce pixilation during Microsoft Teams video meetings from standards-based room systems with adaptive FPS support. Providing improved video refresh rates in bad network conditions, this feature delivers the optimum video experience in low bandwidth situations.
  • Calendar Integration in the Cloud: Administrators can now deploy BlueJeans’ proprietary one-touch join experience for Microsoft Outlook calendar integration without having to deploy an on-premises listener service.
  • Skype Invitation Parsing: Supporting both generic and customized invites, customers using any SIP/H.323 device with BlueJeans calendar integration can now receive Skype for Business calendar invitations on their Gateway enabled endpoint and can join Skype calls with one-touch simplicity.
  • China Premium Access: BlueJeans Gateway is the first CVI solution to announce a dedicated network to handle video conferencing traffic into and out of China. Available soon, this paid add-on ensures a better meeting experience for endpoints joining Microsoft Teams meetings when facing variable in-country network conditions.
  • Spotlight Support: By extending the Spotlight function of Microsoft Teams meetings to Gateway-enabled rooms, conference room participants are now able to see the spotlighted participant on the room screen.
  • Enhanced Mute: When warranted, admins now have the ability to ensure endpoints enabled with BlueJeans Gateway can remain unmuted even if the original Microsoft Teams meeting has ‘Mute for All entry’ settings enabled.
  • Customized Alternate Dial Strings: To further streamline end user access, organizations now have the ability to create an instruction page containing alternative VTC dial strings, based on specific network configurations and video endpoint types.
Also at Ignite today, Microsoft named Verizon as an early launch partner for their new Operator Connect platform, which creates a direct peering relationship between the Microsoft Teams platform and Verizon's far-reaching SIP trunking network giving customers a more secure and enterprise-grade, end-to-end telephony solution and automation of provisioning and management processes.
As a certified gold Microsoft partner, Verizon is uniquely positioned to support organizations of all sizes as they seek to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Teams. Offering customers a more comprehensive communications solution for enhanced team connectivity, whether in the office or working remotely, Verizon is simplifying how enterprises can readily deploy solutions at-scale to streamline connectivity and extract value from their existing Microsoft Teams investments.
These latest enhancements to the BlueJeans Gateway and overall Verizon advanced communications portfolio help to bring dispersed teams safely together—across conference rooms, personal workspaces, and in-home offices—to foster better employee, customer and partner communication.
Learn more about how the BlueJeans Gateway can help you future-proof your collaboration infrastructure to meet the most pressing demands of the hybrid workplace at the BlueJeans Booth at Microsoft Ignite Virtual this week (including your chance to get 15 percent off 3/2-3/4) and take a Gateway test drive today.