What’s happening
Microsoft has created alliances between themselves, Cisco, and Zoom for room systems interoperability. Each of the participants in this alliance will be able to leverage this new solution to deliver a depreciated meeting experience for each other’s platforms on their own room system devices. 

From the blog of Ilya Bukshteyn, Partner Director, Teams Devices, Microsoft:
“…even if my company has fully standardized on Microsoft Teams meetings, one of our partners or customers may still send us an occasional invite for a WebEx or Zoom meeting. Rather than join that meeting on my laptop or mobile device, I’d like to use all of the rich audio and video capabilities of my Microsoft Teams Rooms to also join that meeting.
 
“While the native meetings experience on each of these room systems will always remain richer and more full-featured, we [Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom] all agree that having the ability to easily and simply join the occasional non-native meeting on our room systems is a great thing for our customers. We also expect to expand the list of meeting services and room systems which implement this new web-based approach to non-native meetings as we move further into 2020.”
 
Important to note: 

• Microsoft holds the relevant patents on the implementation aspects and will be licensing it for free to Cisco and Zoom.
• There hasn’t been an official announcement of similar support for Cisco WebEx meetings within Zoom Rooms, and vice versa. The relationships are all between Microsoft and the other companies, individually. 

 
Why this is important to you
Microsoft, Zoom, and Cisco are acknowledging that interoperability is critical to their shared customers, and are taking steps to make it possible for room systems to handle multiple meeting types. Previously, the only alternatives for interoperability were bridging services, which would handle this in a technically complicated and expensive way.  
 
What you get
The ability to one-touch join scheduled non-native meetings, when less functionality is needed.
 
Microsoft
On Microsoft systems you’ll be able to join a Zoom or Cisco WebEx meeting via the calendar in the same manner as you would for native Microsoft Teams and Skype® for Business meetings. This will require you to invite the room to the meeting. 

 
 
You can see it in action in this video at the ~30 minute mark.
https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/83194?source=sessions
 
Zoom
The experience is expected to be much the same for Microsoft Teams meetings within Zoom Rooms, as described in the release below.
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/11/04/zoom-rooms-direct-guest-join-microsoft-teams-meetings/
There hasn’t been an official announcement of similar support for Cisco WebEx meetings within Zoom Rooms.
 
Cisco
The experience was shown in a very limited fashion at the Microsoft Ignite conference, as seen in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKXOIqWrX5E
We don’t know how this will work on the Touch 10 panels.
 
The downsides
These systems will only provide the very basic ability to join meetings by using WebRTC based web clients.
 
Microsoft
Based on what we’ve seen so far, this is the behavior of the Microsoft Room systems:

• Single front-of-room screen support only
  • Touch screen UI becomes a mirror of the front-of-room display during partner call
  • Single participant on screen at a time – active speaker only; no gallery view
• Content ingest only supported via joining meeting
• Limited to Cisco and Zoom
  • List might expand

 
What it all means to you
Overall, this is a positive development for Crestron customers. It will allow you to use Microsoft Teams or Zoom confidently, without fear of losing out on all meeting types.
 
If you use more than Microsoft Teams or Zoom as your platform, or you’d like a more robust experience (i.e. entirely platform agnostic), then check out the new Crestron Mercury® X conference system. It offers the unique flexibility to run native Microsoft Teams or Zoom Rooms, or BYOD mode, which features a new more modern, streamlined UI. So, for organizations standardized on Microsoft Teams or Zoom Rooms, Crestron Mercury X delivers those native experiences, while guests can plug in their laptops and use whichever software they’re already running on their devices.