Meeting Room Interoperability: Joining the Meeting Is Only Half the Battle
For years, the meeting room industry has measured interoperability with one question: how easily can a room join a meeting hosted on another platform? If your organization runs Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), joining Teams meetings is easy. Ideally, users should also be able to walk in, tap a button, and join a Zoom, Webex, or Google Meet meeting.
In my latest article, I argue we may be asking the wrong question. Rather than "How easily can I join the meeting?" we should be asking, "How easily can I accomplish everything I came to the meeting to do?" As meeting platforms evolve well beyond audio, video, and screen sharing, that distinction matters more and more.
Direct Guest Join: Simple, But Limited
Microsoft's Direct Guest Join (DGJ) delivers a genuinely simple experience: find the meeting on the room controller, tap Join, and you're connected. For organizations standardized on MTR, joining other platforms without changing equipment or requiring a laptop is genuinely useful. For attendees who mainly need to listen, speak, and view a presentation, DGJ may be all they need.
The limitations surface when users need to do more, and they can become critical when you are hosting. Microsoft's current DGJ implementation does not support sharing content through the room's HDMI input, interactive whiteboarding, or controlling the meeting lobby. It also carries restrictions on video resolution, display configurations, and access to certain collaboration features.
Enhanced SIP connectivity closes some of the gap, supporting 1080p video, two displays, and HDMI content sharing. However, it is a paid interoperability service that requires a SIP dialing plan plus additional Exchange and tenant configuration. Neither DGJ nor SIP interoperability offers the complete functionality of the meeting platform's native application.
An Interesting Alternative From Barco
This is why I believe organizations evaluating Teams Rooms should take a serious look at Barco's ClickShare Hub. Barco's approach doesn't require abandoning an investment in Microsoft Teams Rooms.
The Hub Core and Hub Pro provide a native, certified MTR experience when deployed with supported peripherals, so Teams meetings work with the familiar room controller and management capabilities. When someone needs to run a Zoom, Webex, or Google Meet meeting, they plug a ClickShare Button into their laptop, connect wirelessly to the room's camera, microphones, speakers, and display, and use their normal conferencing application.
The important nuance: Zoom or Webex isn't running natively on the MTR. The meeting runs on the user's laptop, using the room's professional AV equipment. Employees use the platform exactly the way they already know how.
The Experience Beyond Joining
Consider an employee hosting a customer meeting on Zoom. With DGJ, they can join from the Teams Room, but may still need their laptop for host controls, content sharing, chat, or other features DGJ doesn't expose. Many end up joining the same meeting twice: once from the room for audio and video, and once from the laptop to collaborate and manage the meeting. That works, provided laptop audio is handled correctly, but it adds complexity.
With ClickShare, the host uses the familiar Zoom application, with whatever host controls and collaboration capabilities their account and meeting settings permit, while the room handles the AV. There is no juggling two separate conferencing endpoints.
The benefit extends beyond the meeting itself. Using a personal, authenticated client keeps recordings, transcripts, summaries, and follow-up activities connected across scheduling, conducting, and following up. DGJ doesn't prevent access to those materials afterward, but the room's guest experience sits apart from the user's own meeting account, which adds friction.
The key differentiator isn't that joining is easier. It's that employees use the platform the way they already do on their laptops, while benefiting from the room's professional AV. That consistency has value.
Can Direct Guest Join Ever Keep Up?
Meeting platforms are evolving rapidly as AI becomes embedded in the experience: meeting assistants, transcription, translation, summaries, intelligent content, and automated actions. Each platform has its own implementation, identity requirements, licensing, and approach to exposing those capabilities to other applications.
For DGJ to keep pace, that functionality must be available through the interoperability mechanism and supported by the room system. Because DGJ relies on the host platform's WebRTC experience, some improvements can arrive through the meeting provider's own updates. Still, there are architectural limits; features that work beautifully in a native client may not reach an interoperable room experience. And even native room systems don't support every capability of their desktop counterparts.
My view: DGJ will likely always be playing some degree of catch-up. Not because Microsoft isn't investing, but because interoperability and native application functionality are fundamentally different propositions. As conferencing platforms become intelligent collaboration environments, that difference may become increasingly significant.
ClickShare Isn't Without Compromises
None of this makes ClickShare automatically the better choice. DGJ is excellent for straightforward meetings, especially when users simply want to walk in and join without opening a laptop.
ClickShare requires a compatible laptop, adds another device to the workflow, and depends on the wireless connection and room peripherals working correctly. In practice, though, most employees already run meetings from their laptops when they aren't in a meeting room, so it is a familiar workflow rather than a new one.
For organizations that primarily use Teams and only occasionally join meetings hosted elsewhere, DGJ may be perfectly adequate. Other options are also worth evaluating, including enhanced SIP interoperability services, wired laptop connectivity, and room systems that support more than one native meeting platform. The point isn't that ClickShare is universally superior; it's that it represents a different, viable approach to the interoperability problem.
It's Time to Rethink How We Measure Interoperability
Today we tend to judge room interoperability by which platforms a room can join, whether one-touch join is supported, and whether audio, video, and content sharing work. Those measures are important but increasingly insufficient. Organizations should evaluate the complete meeting workflow: scheduling, joining, presenting, collaborating, hosting, and following up.
Can employees accomplish what they need without workarounds? Can they use the platform's features? Can they run the meeting with tools they already know? A room that joins every platform but restricts what people can accomplish isn't necessarily better than one that requires an extra step to connect.
Successful meeting room interoperability shouldn't be measured by whether users can quickly join a meeting. It should be measured by whether they can accomplish everything they came to the meeting to do. As AI continues to reshape meetings, I suspect that distinction will only grow in importance.
Update: Microsoft Cross-Platform Meeting Connect
On the day I planned to publish the original article, Microsoft announced Cross-Platform Meeting Connect, which in the future intends to address some of these interoperability issues. Key points for now: it is not yet available; Zoom currently says it will arrive before the second half of 2027; and Microsoft hopes other vendors will announce participation soon.
I think it's a great initiative, and I'll provide updates as features become generally available. My analysis focuses on what is available today. And the question I asked about DGJ, whether it can ever keep up, applies equally to Cross-Platform Meeting Connect.
This post summarizes my original LinkedIn article. Read the full piece and join the discussion in the comments on LinkedIn.
