Meetings location in Microsoft Teams

I’m sure some of my blog readers remember back when OCS or Lync came out we’d get a brand new CHM file that we would comb over looking for what was new or changed. Everything at the time had that new tech smell. It was awesome. I’ll be honest, learning something new about a technology never gets old for me. This blog post is a perfect example of why. I was doing a walk-through of a presentation I was going to help with and the speaker had a slide in there that caught my eye. I literally said “wait, stop, go back to the previous slide!”. As I read it, my eyes were opened to something I didn’t know and it took me back to those days of reading the CHM for something new.

What caught my eye was this: A Microsoft Teams conference is hosted by Office 365 cloud in the same region where the first participant joined. Why is that such a big revelation? Cause in the on-premises world, that would never happen. In the on-prem world, we always knew that the MCU was based on the meeting organizer.

Why is this so fascinating to me? Well, think about it from a global perspective. If I have 10 folks invited to a meeting and let’s say that some are in the US and Some are in Europe. If a person in Europe is the first person to join, then the MCU will be in Europe.

Here’s a quick example:

This thought is why it is really important to plan your approach to Microsoft Teams appropriately. If you have centralized Internet or something that could delay a user getting on to the Microsoft network quickly, then it could have an impact on meeting quality. You can take a look here for the thoughts around preparing your network for Microsoft Teams: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network.

Something to note here, we are talking about the data in flight portion of the meeting only. The MCU is where all the media streams go to and get redistributed to the participants. We are not talking about the data at rest (i.e. meeting notes, attachments, etc.). That is all still kept safe and secure based on the meeting organizer’s location and tenant. This is important as we don’t want to cross security or governance boundaries.

If you want more info around the Meeting location, you can find the documentation to it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/microsoft-teams-online-call-flows#principles. (HT to Bryan Nice for helping me find the specific link). Always stay learning my friends!