For the past 18 months video conferencing has become the primary mode of communication for organizations throughout the world. The pandemic has shifted global teams into a new era of work that is radically different from our previous in-office work experience. As famously stated by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”…and that was just at the beginning of the pandemic.
As our collective style of working has continued to evolve during the past year and a half, one of the new realities of digital work is that each organization has expanded and refined its own toolkit for collaboration. Ultimately, this means that every organization has a patchwork of services that hybrid workers depend on for communicating both inside the organization and out. While it’s relatively straightforward for a knowledge worker on their desktop to bounce around from app to app to join different meetings, it has the potential to become much more painful once workers return to the office and venture into conference rooms to join their video calls.
To help simplify and streamline the process of joining different conferencing services from a room-based video endpoint, BlueJeans is excited to announce support for Microsoft Direct Guest Join. Direct Guest Join is an approach that enables native meeting room devices to connect to alternative meeting services via embedded web technology. Microsoft and BlueJeans will both be enabling the Direct Guest Join capability from their video conferencing systems by leveraging the web app for their respective meeting services. This functionality will be supported on the latest generations of meeting room devices.
Through this embedded web experience, customers will be able to use their native Microsoft Teams Room devices to directly join BlueJeans Meetings, and vice versa, without resetting the device or punching in cumbersome meeting IDs. The web-enabled room experience will provide basic functionality to control in-room audio and video features. Direct Guest Join will be available for customers to preview in the second half of 2022.
Direct Guest Join complements an existing portfolio of BlueJeans and Microsoft integrations designed for enhanced interoperability. BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft Certified Cloud Video Interop solution that easily allows customers to connect their legacy H.323 & SIP-based conference room systems to Microsoft Team Meetings. Additionally, BlueJeans offers an intelligent bot for Microsoft Teams to easily escalate into a BlueJeans Meeting. BlueJeans also offers a robust calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook to simplify the invitation and join process for BlueJeans Meetings.
Overall, we are excited to continue our longstanding relationship with Microsoft to boost productivity of hybrid workers. As we all look forward to returning to some state of normalcy, we are hopeful that our continued innovation around conference rooms will enable our customers to have confidence, that whether they are extending the value of their existing hardware or purchasing new gear, they will be enabling their end users to stay connected and leverage the power of video to keep their operations running smoothly.
About the Author
Satya Prakash Pati is a Product Manager at BlueJeans responsible for BlueJeans Rooms. He is an innovative, passionate and data-driven product manager with experience managing the end-to-end product lifecycle and launching multiple products in Asia, the US and Europe. Prior to joining BlueJeans, Satya worked with various companies like Siemens, Arris, Motorola/Google, Tata-Elxsi at various capacities. Satya holds a MBA degree in Marketing and Strategy from Xavier Institute of Management and has multiple US patents to his name.
