Microsoft Teams Rooms auto enrollment into the Teams Admin Center (TAC)

So if you have been following the recent news of the Microsoft Teams Room Systems, one of the largest steps forward is that now they can be managed in the Teams Admin Center. Teams Admin Center is otherwise known as TAC. You can find more about that topic from Microsoft as it is documented here.

We had a great overview of the auto enrollment on the MTR AMA in the August event which is a community event that Graham Walsh and I host monthly. In the events, we always focus on that months announcements and have open discussions with end customers, Microsoft partners, Microsoft sellers and anyone who might be interested or even have MTR systems and just want to have discussions about the systems and their tips and tricks. You can sign up here and we will send you calendar invites with Microsoft Teams meeting information.

OVERVIEW OF WHAT IS BELOW

What is covered below is strictly regarding the auto-enrollment process that lives both in the cloud and on the device itself and does not go deep into the management capabilities of the TAC itself. This will serve as some reference material should you have an issue with not being able to auto enroll a unit or troubles with the service and where to look for troubleshooting information

HOW DOES THE AUTO ENROLLMENT START

Well first what you are going to need to do is make sure that your setting on the MTR unit is set to include Microsoft Teams. If you are Skype for Business only on the unit, then auto enrollment WILL NOT HAPPEN. Once you have this set to a Microsoft Teams setting and enter the appropriate account information, auto enrollment will start from there. It’s that simple.

Now that you should have the device in the TAC, you should be able to manage that device appropriately and statistics and device information will flow appropriately between the end device and the TAC.

AGENT SETTINGS ON THE DEVICE SIDE

So to find the service that is auto enrolling and sending/receiving information to the TAC on the MTR unit itself you need to log into the admin portion of your MTR and search for services. Scroll to the bottom and you will find the “Win Device Admin Agent”. This is the service that is starting and performing your auto enrollment among other things. This service runs on the local unit to push up to the TAC center as well as receives the commands and info from the TAC center. Whenever you are having issues with the TAC and need to look at the device, you will want to check this service as a troubleshooting step and make sure it is not set to disabled and is actually running and has not stopped. You can right click on the service to see more options of what you can do here.

HOW DO I STOP THE UNIT FROM BEING MONITORED?

The easiest way to accomplish this will be to go into TAC after it has registered itself and then in the upper right hand corner of that device account, there is an option to “Block Device”. This will now stop sending and receiving information from that device and will show a blocked message next to the device itself. The next step if you do not want this device in the TAC at all for management would be to remove the device.

You can also take the following steps to also stop auto enrollment from happening, but these are more difficult than just doing it within the TAC itself and you should stick with managing the status through the portal if you can..

1. You can put it into the Skypesettings.xml document and the format to disable it is as follows. The document and its instructions for how to manage a unit via the xml is found here.

<SkypeSettings>
<DisableTacCommunication>True</DisableTacCommunication>
</SkypeSettings>

1. You can also disable the service on the local unit which will stop it from running, but this would only be the last resort if nothing else worked and isn’t really recommended for long term. This should only be a troubleshooting step if something was happening.

LOOKING AT THE LOGS

So many times looking at the logs, you can find information and the log files for the service on the local machine are in text format. I use notepad++ for all of the text files that I look at as it makes it much easier to view, but on the local MTR machine you can just use notepad.

The location of the log files is

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WinAgent\Prod\Logs

but these should be included whenever you are exporting logs and show up as

win_agent_logs-*****.txt.

There is a lot of information in these logs and maybe we can work on a tool to parse them, but for now the most effective tool I have used is Notepad++.

RESOURCES FOR MORE INFORMATION

1. You should make sure to sign up for the MTR AMA community events here.
2. Subscribe to this YouTube Channel that has so many videos on MTR devices. These videos are a great place to start to learn more about these fantastic devices.
3. Quick tips on the Teams Admin Center with MTR units.
4. Manage your devices in Microsoft Teams.