Meeting Rooms & Collaboration

A Microsoft Teams Room (MTR) is a meeting room with certified hardware — dedicated compute device, ceiling or table microphones, beamforming speakers, PTZ or auto-framing camera, touch console — that runs the Microsoft Teams meeting client as the native interface for the room. The difference from a regular TV is that meetings start with a single tap on the console rather than someone walking in with a laptop, fiddling with cables and asking the remote attendees if they can be heard. The room is also monitored centrally so we see device issues (camera offline, audio failing, panel disconnected) before the next meeting starts.

All five are Microsoft-certified for Teams Rooms; the right choice depends on room size, geometry, budget and the level of customisation needed. Logitech Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini are excellent all-in-one units for small to medium rooms (huddle through to mid-size). Poly Studio bars cover similar ground with strong audio performance, particularly in untreated rooms. Yealink is the strongest value option across all room sizes. Neat (Neat Bar, Neat Board) is the design-led choice and excellent for executive spaces. Crestron and similar custom-AV vendors are the right answer for boardrooms with dual-display, ceiling-array audio and integration into broader building AV. We pick the right kit for the room rather than defaulting to one vendor.

All-in-one bars (Logitech, Poly, Yealink, Neat) cover spaces from 4-person huddle rooms through to 12-person mid-size meeting rooms with the camera and microphone array integrated into a single device on or under the screen. For larger rooms — 14 to 30 people, boardrooms, training rooms, hybrid lecture spaces — the design splits into separate ceiling microphones, beamforming arrays and ceiling-mounted PTZ cameras, with the compute device hidden in a rack. The threshold is roughly room length (under 6 metres, all-in-one bars work; over 6 metres, separated audio is needed). Acoustic treatment matters more than people realise — even the best kit struggles in a glass-walled room with hard surfaces.

Yes. Microsoft Teams Rooms support Direct Guest Join for Zoom, Google Meet, Webex and other major platforms — staff start a meeting on the third-party platform and the room joins as a guest with full audio, video and content-share. The native interface is still Teams, but the room is not Teams-only. For organisations that primarily use Zoom rather than Teams, we also deploy Zoom Rooms (Zoom's equivalent product) on the same Logitech / Poly / Yealink hardware. The hardware is the same; the licensed software stack switches based on the platform. We pick the right answer per customer rather than pushing Teams Rooms as the default.

An all-in-one bar in an existing room with power and a TV in place is typically a half-day install — mount the bar, install the touch console, provision the compute device against your M365 tenant, configure the meeting calendar and run user acceptance testing. A larger room with separated ceiling microphones, beamforming audio and ceiling-mounted cameras is a one to two day install plus a half-day commissioning visit. New-build rooms or boardroom refurbishments where ceilings, walls and cabling are being changed alongside the AV are typically scoped as part of the broader fit-out project and run on the same schedule.

Hardware sits in three rough bands. Huddle rooms (Logitech Rally Bar Mini, Yealink MeetingBar A20) start around NZ$5,000 to NZ$7,000 fully installed. Mid-size meeting rooms (Logitech Rally Bar, Poly Studio X70, Neat Bar Pro) typically sit in the NZ$8,000 to NZ$15,000 range fully installed. Large rooms and boardrooms with separated AV, dual displays and ceiling audio scale from NZ$25,000 upward depending on room complexity. Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro licences (required for the room compute) add a per-room-per-month subscription. Managed AV (monitoring, firmware, fix-on-fail) is an additional per-room-per-month fee on top.

Usually yes for the TV. Any TV with HDMI input and decent resolution works as the display for a Microsoft Teams Room — the room's audio, video and intelligence come from the certified bar or compute device, not the TV. The TV is essentially just a screen. Existing in-ceiling audio is a different question: if your room has decent ceiling speakers and microphones already, we can integrate them into the MTR through a Crestron or QSC processor rather than replacing them. Existing webcams and USB conference cams are usually replaced — they are typically not Microsoft-certified, do not auto-frame, and degrade the meeting experience compared to certified hardware.