Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms for London Workplaces

Microsoft Teams Rooms is Microsoft's software for dedicated meeting-room systems, running on purpose-built hardware rather than on someone's laptop. The room has its own calendar and identity, so scheduled meetings appear on the room controller and start with one touch. Platform variants run on Windows or Android, and hardware that passes Microsoft's certification programme carries the designation Certified for Microsoft Teams. For an organisation working in Microsoft 365, a Teams Rooms deployment gives every meeting space the same dependable join experience, native to the tools people already use.

Zoom Rooms is Zoom's room-system experience: dedicated hardware that turns a physical meeting space into a first-class Zoom participant. A Zoom Rooms Controller on the table starts and manages meetings, a scheduling display outside the room can show availability, and Zoom Rooms Appliances combine camera, microphones, speakers and compute in certified all-in-one devices. Devices are managed centrally through Zoom Device Management (ZDM) in the Zoom web portal. For organisations that standardise on Zoom, the result is the same one-touch simplicity in every room, at every size of space.

Crestron Flex is Crestron's family of conferencing systems: tabletop conference devices, video-bar based room kits, integrator kits and upgrade kits, covering spaces from small huddle rooms to boardrooms. Each kit is supplied for a specific platform: -T variants run Microsoft Teams Rooms software and -Z variants run Zoom Rooms software, so the family supports both platforms while each installed system runs one natively. Flex systems can be provisioned, monitored and managed remotely through Crestron's XiO Cloud service, which matters when you are operating rooms across an estate rather than one at a time.

Not natively at the same time; a Crestron Flex system is ordered as either a Teams Rooms or a Zoom Rooms device. There are practical routes to cross-platform meetings, though. On Teams Rooms, Microsoft's Direct Guest Join feature allows joining Zoom or Webex meetings from the room, provided it is enabled and the invitation is correctly formatted. Some Flex models also offer a BYOD switch mode, letting a laptop drive the room's camera and audio for any platform. We design the approach around how your organisation actually meets, then configure and test it during commissioning where that is included in the scope.

Each Teams Rooms system needs a room licence: Microsoft Teams Rooms Basic or Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro. Basic is free with a certified Teams Rooms system, is capped at 25 rooms per organisation and cannot licence Teams panels; Pro adds advanced management through the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal, together with capabilities such as Front row and dual-screen support. The older Standard and Premium licence names are legacy and no longer used. Licensing is an operating decision as much as a technical one, so we set out the implications for your estate during design rather than leaving them to be discovered at rollout.

Both platforms run formal hardware programmes. Devices that pass the Microsoft Teams Device Certification Program carry the designation Certified for Microsoft Teams; Zoom's equivalent is the Zoom Hardware Certification Program, whose devices carry the Zoom Certified badge. Certification applies to the hardware, not to any installer, and it matters because certified devices are tested against the platform and supported through its update cycle. We specify rooms around certified hardware and check the current certification status of proposed models at specification stage, so the estate you buy is the estate the platforms support.

Dependable rooms are as much a network exercise as an audiovisual one. Video calls are real-time traffic, so the network needs appropriate quality-of-service configuration; touch panels, scheduling screens and some devices draw Power over Ethernet, so switch capacity and PoE budgets matter; and room systems should sit within a security and segregation policy agreed with your IT team. We design the cabling, switching and configuration requirements alongside the room design and coordinate them with your existing infrastructure, so the rooms behave predictably from the first call rather than after weeks of tuning.

Yes. Crestron Flex systems can be provisioned, monitored and managed through Crestron's XiO Cloud service; Microsoft Teams Rooms estates with Pro licences gain the Teams Rooms Pro Management portal; and Zoom Rooms are managed through Zoom Device Management in the Zoom web portal. Used well, these platforms surface faults before the people in the room do, a disconnected camera or an unhealthy device raises an alert, not a support ticket. Some capabilities depend on the licences your organisation holds, and ongoing monitoring or managed support is agreed as part of the appointment where you want it.

A scheduling panel sits beside the door and shows at a glance whether the room is free, what is booked next and, where enabled, lets the room be reserved on the spot. Crestron's room scheduling touch screens, the TSS-770 and TSS-1070, are available in variants that run the Microsoft Teams panels app or the Zoom Rooms scheduling application, and Crestron's standard scheduling application integrates with calendars including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar. Panels remove the two classic frustrations of shared rooms: not knowing whether a room is actually free, and meetings colliding at the door.

Yes, standardisation is usually the single most valuable decision in a meeting-room project. We develop a room standard for each size of space: the same controller in the same place, the same join experience, consistent displays, cameras and audio, and consistent cabling and documentation behind the scenes. Anyone who has used one room can use them all, support teams troubleshoot one design rather than a dozen, and procurement and spares become simpler. The standard is recorded in drawings and schedules, so it can be repeated accurately across floors, phases and future fit-outs.

Because the far end experiences your room only through its camera and microphones. A bright window behind the table turns participants into silhouettes; hard finishes make speech boomy and tiring to follow; ventilation noise the room's occupants stopped noticing is amplified to everyone remote. We coordinate meeting-room technology with lighting quality, glare and shading, background-noise levels and finishes as part of the room design, often alongside our lighting and shading work, so people look and sound as professional to a client abroad as they do across the table.

AVC is a design-led consultancy that also delivers and commissions systems on selected projects. Some clients appoint us to design and specify a meeting-room standard for delivery by others; on other projects, delivery, commissioning, user training and ongoing support are included in the appointment and agreed explicitly in the scope. Either way, the design work stands on its own: coordinated drawings, schedules and clear tender information that let contractors price accurately and give your organisation a room standard it owns.