How to Cast to a Microsoft Teams Room on the Teams Desktop Client

Hello Readers, I hope you’re well.

This is a feature I have been waiting for for a long time. We have been able to do this from the Teams mobile client forever it seems. But now, this extremely useful feature has finally come to the Teams desktop client. And it works flawlessly.

You can now Cast from the Teams desktop client to a nearby Microsoft Teams Room. Very simple and just works.

All you need to do to begin is hit the … menu and you will see a new Cast icon

This opens up the search for a nearby room. Just like Casting from mobile and proximity join, casting uses Bluetooth beaconing to find the room. So make sure Bluetooth is on on your rooms and your PC.

Select the room you want to cast to and click next

Here you can decide what you want to do. Choose from

• Just cast – This starts a new casting session to a room without joining a scheduled meeting
• Cast and join – this joins both your desktop and the Teams room into a scheduled meeting and starts casting. This is similar to join and add a room, but with casting.

Now decide what you want to cast.

• Screen – casts one of your screens
• Windows – opens a dialogue to let you cast an application window
• PowerPoint Live – this finds a couple of recent PowerPoint files you’ve opened or worked on and allows you to present it using PowerPoint Live

Select what you want and click Cast

This sends a command to the room via Teams to start a meet now meeting with the user on the Teams Desktop client. You don’t need to do anything to make it work. The meeting starts automatically. The Teams Desktop client joins in present mode with video and audio off

and whatever you selected will be displayed on the front of room screen connected to the room.

If you just chose to cast, you can add participants either from Teams desktop or from the MTR controls. When you’re done casting or want to change what you’re casting, just stop sharing and select something else. Remember, at this point it is just a standard Teams meeting with you and an MTR.

If you chose to cast and join, same thing applies. It’s just a meeting.

Now when you’re ready to finish your casting session you need to make sure you End the meeting. If you click leave, your Teams desktop casting session will leave the meeting, but the MTR will stay in it. Use the drop down box next to leave and select End meeting.

Then click End on the popup

Casting works on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows and Android. As I said, just make sure Bluetooth is turned on on either.

Additionally you need to make sure proximity join is enabled

• In Windows you need to allow Bluetooth Beaconing.

• In Android you need to go to device settings and find Meetings. Enable Proximity Meeting Join.

And that’s it. I think this is a great and useful feature. We can already share content to a Microsoft Teams Room using a cable and sometimes a wireless presentation adapter and even standards based sharing like Miracast. But I think this is better. It joins both you and the room into an empty or existing meeting so you can drive the content and the meeting just like you would normally.

This is great if you already have the Teams Desktop client. I’d also love to see this come to Teams browser client or for there to be some kind of lightweight app that you can use. This would be more for guest users who don’t have Teams installed. You can direct them to a site to download the app and they can begin sharing.

Of course there are a lot of what ifs. Like disabled Bluetooth. The inability to install or run the app or the Teams desktop client. But if casting isn’t available you can always fall back to using a cable to cast your screen.

Thanks for reading and I’ll catch you next time…