Configuring the Surface Hub for Teams usage

With everybody slowly shifting back to the office, being able to provide meetings which are “safety proof” are important. The best way to accommodate this is by using video conferencing with Teams (of course ) to allow people to choose from where they want to join the meeting while still getting the feeling of having everyone “in the room”.

There are several ways to do this. One of them is by using the Surface Hub which I think is awesome! The Surface Hub is a Windows 10 enabled touchscreen and built for use with Microsoft Teams.

In this blog I will be addressing all the things you need to configure in order to get a good user experience on the Surface Hub.

Setting up the account

The first step is really easy, just set up a new Room mailbox and assign the mailbox account a Meeting Room license.

In this blog I’ve called my room mailbox “Surface Hub” but remember that when you create a new appointment from Outlook you select the Surface Hub as a room so remember to choose the appropriate name for the Room mailbox you’re going to create.

Next, go into the Users > Active Users overview and reset the user password. Take note of this password as you will need it when you want to set up the Hub and register it with Intune.

Also, after you’ve setup the device, enable Password Rotation so the password doesn’t get expired due to a password policy:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface-hub/surface-hub-2s-manage-passwords

The Meeting Room license is completely tailored towards using the Surface Hub because of it’s inclusion of Teams, Skype, Intune, Audio Conferencing and Phone System license options. This makes it possible to organize and also join (dial-in) meetings right from the Hub and manage the device with Intune.

Hybrid accounts

When you have a hybrid setup with Exchange the creation of the account works a little bit different.

You should create a new room mailbox on your local Exchange server and sync the account with AD Connect. Also make sure you enable the account and set a password. Don’t forget that the account should have the non-expiring password option turned ON. If you don’t set the account password to never expire your Surface Hub will lose the connection to Exchange when the password expires.

If you don’t create the account this way users won’t be able to add the Surface Hub as a room resource while scheduling a meeting.

Enable automatic calendar processing

You can set the calendar processing options via a PowerShell oneliner Microsoft has made available on their setup page.:

https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-nl/surface-hub/surface-hub-2s-account?source=docs#set-calendar-auto-processing

Look at the parameters before running this command so you have the right options set up for your “room”.

The goal of running this command is making sure the Surface Hub manages it’s own availability as well as the room it’s placed in.

Managing the device through Intune

To manage the Surface Hub you will need to create a device configuration profile with the profile type of “Windows 10 Team”.

The Surface Hub is installed with a special version of Windows 10 targeted on the Surface Hubs experience.

Please see below link for more details on the OS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface-hub/differences-between-surface-hub-and-windows-10-enterprise

So you start of with selecting the platform for the configuration profile which is Windows 10 and then select the profile type “Windows 10 Team”

Then on the next screen you specify the configuration settings you want to apply on the Hub. You can go trough all the options and adjust them to your own needs.

Then apply them to “All Devices” or select a group of devices. Because this profile type is specifically ended towards the Team edition of Windows 10 I’m going to select “All Devices”.

The Applicability Rules tab will also give you the option to filter out specific members of a group based on their properties to apply the policy on. I’m not going to this for now.

Afther that the last thing you need to do is review the configuration changes you’ve made and hit Create

Teams meeting experience

Don’t forget that when you start using the Surface Hub, meeting invitations will go to external participants with a Teams meeting template applied.

To get a sleek look you should at least add the company logo to your Teams invitations if you haven’t done so already.

You can set all of the meeting template options via the following link: https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/meetings/settings

This ends my blog for today,

Happy meetings y’all!