BlueJeans by Verizon announced new enhancements to its BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams solution (BlueJeans Gateway). As organizations look to advance their hybrid workplace initiatives, the Blue Jeans Gateway gives organizations the ability to extend their Microsoft Teams collaboration capabilities—regardless of where employees are located.
Additionally Microsoft named Verizon as an early launch partner for their new Operator Connect platform. Operator Connect 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.
“The pandemic has intensified the need for organizations to have enterprise-grade collaboration solutions for their global workforces to stay connected and work more effectively from every possible environment,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, President of Global Enterprise at Verizon Business.
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. 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.
To date, close to 650 customers 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.
- 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.
- Calendar Integration in the Cloud: Administrators can now deploy BlueJeans’ proprietary one-touch join experience for Microsoft Outlook calendar
- 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.
- 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.
