If half your business runs Microsoft 365 and the other half runs Google Workspace, your meeting rooms are the place that mismatch becomes visible to clients. A room built for Teams will join a Google Meet call badly or not at all, depending on which platform the room hardware runs, and the reverse is equally true. This is fixable, but not by buying a screen and a camera and hoping.
The short version: buy hardware that is certified for both, understand that only one of the two vendors’ interop paths runs on the platform you probably bought, and create the room a calendar account in both suites. The detail is below.
Why a room certified for one platform handles the other badly
A modern meeting room system is not a screen. It is a small computer running a room operating system, signed in to one platform’s cloud, reading one calendar. The camera, microphone and speaker are peripherals attached to it.
That architecture is why cross-platform joining is a feature rather than an assumption. When a Teams Room joins a Google Meet call, it is not “just opening the link”. It is either running a stripped-down web client against Google’s service, or dialling into a gateway that translates between the two. Both work. Both are worse than a native join, in ways you should know before you promise a client a good call.
Microsoft publishes exactly how much worse. Its two mechanisms, Direct Guest Join over WebRTC and Cross-Platform joining over SIP, have documented ceilings: Direct Guest Join is limited to a single display and 720p at 30 frames per second in each direction, cannot send content from an HDMI input or a content camera, and gives you no lobby control. Cross-Platform over SIP supports two displays and 1080p at 30 frames per second, but requires a Teams Rooms Pro licence and a paid SIP dialling plan.
So the honest framing is not “does it work”. It is “which of these meetings are we willing to run at 720p on one screen with no content sharing from the room camera”.
The four practical options
Option one: a dedicated room system per platform. One Teams Room and one Google Meet room, in different rooms. Simple, fully featured on both, and the most expensive. It also creates the social problem of people booking the wrong room, which is only solved by naming them clearly and putting the platform on the door.
Option two: a bring-your-own-device room with a USB bar. No room system at all. A single USB video bar with a camera, microphone array and speaker, a display, and a cable at the table. Whoever is chairing plugs their laptop in and runs the meeting from their own account, on whatever platform they like. It works identically on Teams, Meet, Zoom and anything else, because the room hardware is just a webcam and a speakerphone as far as the laptop is concerned.
This is the option most mixed-fleet businesses underrate. It has no licensing, no room accounts, no interop limits and no platform lock-in. What it gives up is one-touch join, a room calendar on the wall, remote management and health monitoring, and a consistent experience when the person chairing has never used the room before. In a business with two or three rooms and technically confident staff, that trade is often correct.
Option three: a room system that supports both natively. A single appliance that can be run as a Teams Room or as a Google Meet device, chosen at deployment. This is the option most people want and it exists, but read the next section carefully, because “supports both” usually means “supports one at a time” rather than “joins both equally well”.
Option four: casting. Wireless presenting from a laptop to the room display. Useful as a supplement, not a substitute, because it solves screen sharing and does not solve the camera, the microphone or the calendar.
What is actually supported is much narrower than the word “casting” implies, and both vendors document it precisely.
Microsoft supports Miracast on Teams Rooms, with four conditions attached. It is Windows only, it requires an all-in-one touch board device (Teams Rooms devices with a separate console are not yet supported), the room needs a Teams Rooms Pro licence, and the sending workstation has to support Miracast itself. It is off by default and is switched on per room in the Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal. Microsoft states plainly that Miracast is not available for Teams Rooms on Android, which rules out every dual-certified bar in the next section. Once enabled, Miracast behaves like the HDMI input, so the content can also be shared into a Teams meeting. The other two Microsoft paths remain Teams Cast, which shares from the Teams app on your own device, and a plain HDMI cable.
Google does not offer an equivalent. Google’s Meet hardware documentation describes two ways to get content onto the room display: an HDMI cable from your laptop to the room device, or joining the meeting from your laptop and presenting into it. Google Cast is documented for casting a Meet call to a Chromecast or other Cast-enabled television, which is a consumer path and a different product from a Meet hardware room system. Google does not document a Cast receiver on Meet hardware.
Neither vendor documents AirPlay support in its room systems. If your business is Apple-heavy and people expect to mirror from a MacBook or an iPad without joining a meeting first, budget for a separate wireless presentation appliance or accept the HDMI cable, and test it in the room before you promise it to anyone.
Certified and compatible are not the same word
This distinction costs businesses money, so be precise about it.
Microsoft runs the Microsoft Teams devices certification programme, which tests audio and video quality, user interface, device management and security. Microsoft’s own documentation states plainly that the certification programme does not evaluate feature-level or cloud environment support. A device can be fully certified for Teams and still not do the specific thing you need, including third-party interop.
Google runs an equivalent programme and publishes a certification list for both of its hardware platforms, with a certification date and a support end date against each model. Google’s list is the authoritative answer to “will this bar run Google Meet”, and it is short.
“Compatible” is a vendor’s word, not a certification. A USB bar that is “compatible with Google Meet” simply means it presents as a standard camera and microphone to a laptop, which every USB bar does. That is fine if you are building option two. It is not the same as being a Google Meet room.
Which devices are genuinely certified for both
Cross-referencing Microsoft’s certified Teams Rooms on Android list against Google’s certification list for Android Open Source Project based Meet hardware, the devices that appear on both are, at the time of writing:
- Logitech Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, Rally Bar Huddle and Rally Board 65, which run Logitech’s CollabOS firmware.
- Poly (HP) Studio X30, X50, X70, X32, X52 and X72.
- Neat Neat Bar Generation 2, Neat Bar Pro, Neat Board 32, Neat Board 50 and Neat Board Pro 65, which Neat manages through its Neat Pulse platform and which it also documents as supporting a dedicated bring-your-own-device mode.
Logitech also publishes its own certification matrix in the CollabOS admin guide, model by model, covering Zoom Rooms Appliance, Zoom Rooms on Windows and Mac, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, Google Meet on ChromeOS with a Meet compute box, Google Meet on Android, and Tencent. Read it alongside Google’s list rather than instead of it. At the time of writing the two do not entirely agree: Logitech shows Google Meet on Android as coming soon for the Rally Board 65, while Google’s own certification list already shows that model as certified with a May 2026 certification date. Where a vendor page and Google’s list disagree, buy on Google’s list, because that is the one that governs whether you can enrol and licence the device.
Two vendors worth flagging. Yealink and Jabra appear on Microsoft’s certified Teams Rooms on Android list. Neither appears anywhere on Google’s published certification lists, and there are two of those to check: the list of Android Open Source Project certified Meet devices, and the separate list of certified ChromeOS peripherals and devices used with a Meet compute box. Neither vendor is on either list. Jabra publishes its own claim of participation in the Google Meet hardware certification programme, which covers its audio device range rather than a room bar running Meet as the room’s operating system, and Yealink markets its room bars as compatible with Google Meet rather than certified for it.
That gap between “certified for Meet” and “works with Meet” is worth spelling out, because it is where money gets wasted. Certified means the exact model appears on Google’s list, can be enrolled and licensed as Meet hardware, runs Meet as the room’s own operating system, receives Meet updates, and has a published Google end of support date. Google states on both of those pages that it cannot offer support or resolve issues for customers who enrol devices that are not supported. Works with, or compatible, means the device presents as a camera, microphone and speaker to a laptop that is running Meet, which is option two above and is a perfectly good room if that is what you intended to buy. Only the first gives you a one-touch-join Google Meet room. If a quote describes a Yealink or Jabra bar as “for Google Meet”, ask which of those two things is being sold, and check the specific model number against Google’s list yourself before you sign.
Also check the support end dates, because they are wildly uneven and they are published. Google lists the Poly X30, X50 and X70 as having reached end of Meet support in July 2026, while the Logitech Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini run to October 2028, the Rally Board 65 to May 2033, and the Neat Bar Generation 2 and Bar Pro to January 2033 with the Neat Board range to May 2033. Buying a device with two years of support left because it was on the shelf is a false economy in a room you expect to keep for five.
The interop asymmetry nobody warns you about
This is the single most important paragraph in this article, because it determines which platform your room hardware should run.
On the Microsoft side, Google Meet Direct Guest Join is Windows only. Microsoft’s third-party join documentation lists Webex, Zoom and Google Meet as supported for Direct Guest Join, with Google Meet marked Windows only, both for the calendar join button and for joining by meeting ID. Teams Rooms on Android cannot join a Google Meet call this way. It can reach Meet through the Cross-Platform SIP path, but that requires a Teams Rooms Pro licence and a paid SIP dialling plan.
On the Google side, the mirror image applies. Google’s admin help states that you can join a Teams meeting using ChromeOS-based Google Meet hardware, and that currently you cannot join a Teams meeting using Android-based Meet hardware devices. For Android-based Meet hardware, the supported path to Teams is through Pexip-powered interop, which an administrator must enable.
Put those two together and the consequence is stark. Every dual-certified bar in the list above is an Android device. So if you deploy a Logitech, Poly or Neat bar as a Teams Room and expect it to join Google Meet natively, it will not. And if you deploy the same bar as a Google Meet device and expect it to join Teams natively, it will not either, without Pexip in the middle.
Cost is the one piece of good news on the Google side, and it is worth knowing before a reseller prices it as an upgrade. Google’s admin help states that Meet hardware devices can join Webex, Teams and Zoom meetings using built-in interoperability at no additional cost, that the feature is on by default, and that the ability to turn on Meet interoperability is included with all paid Google Workspace licences. The paid exception is Pexip. Pexip Connect for Google Rooms, which is the path Android-based Meet hardware uses to reach Teams and SIP, is a separate subscription that must be licensed from Pexip or a partner and then enabled in the admin console.
Google also publishes the feature gaps in that free interop, and they are not trivial. Presenting over HDMI works when joining Webex and Zoom, and does not work when joining Teams by either the built-in path or Pexip. Dual-screen support works in none of them. Changing the participant layout works only in Zoom. Third-party equipment controls are not available from the room’s touch controller at all.
The two configurations that do give you native cross-platform joining are a Teams Room on Windows (which can Direct Guest Join Google Meet, Zoom and Webex), or a ChromeOS-based Google Meet system (which can join Teams). Neither of those is the Android bar most people are shown in a demo.
Room sizing and the microphone reality
Microsoft publishes room dimensions against its certified Android devices, which is more useful than most planning guidance: focus room 2.4 by 2.4 metres, huddle room 3 by 3 metres, small meeting room 4.5 by 4.5 metres, medium 4.5 by 6 metres, and large 4.5 by 8.5 metres. Google defines huddle, small, medium and large spaces across both of its platforms, with an extra large category available only on the ChromeOS platform.
The practical rule those numbers encode: a single all-in-one bar is a small-room product. Microsoft’s own guidance is that all-in-one audio devices suit small spaces where participants are close to the device, that medium and large rooms want separate microphone and speaker arrays, and that the largest spaces need specialist multi-microphone and multi-camera designs.
Microphone pickup is where rooms most often disappoint, and it is almost always the same cause: a bar at the front of a long table trying to pick up someone at the far end, in a room with hard surfaces and no acoustic treatment. Beamforming helps and does not fix it. If you have a boardroom over about six metres long, budget for ceiling or table microphones from the outset. Also fix the room itself: a rug, curtains or an acoustic panel does more for call quality than the next model up.
Cameras have an equivalent problem in reverse. A single fixed camera at the front of a long table makes the far end of the table unreadable. This is what the multi-camera and panoramic room view features exist to solve, and on the Microsoft side those sit behind the Pro licence.
Cabling and power at the table, decided before the joiner builds it
Get this wrong and it is a permanent, visible irritation.
Every room needs, at minimum: power at the display, a data outlet at the display position for the room system, and a run from the display position to the table. The table needs power and a connection for laptops, ideally a single USB-C cable that carries video, data and charging in one. Two cables at the table is one cable too many and someone will always pick the wrong one.
If you are running a bring-your-own-device room, the table cable is the room. Specify a decent quality cable with a tidy retraction or cable management solution, because a loose cable on a boardroom table gets damaged and looks bad. If you are running a room system with a touch console, that console needs its own cabled connection to the compute device or to the network depending on the model, and that run has to exist in the table.
Do this at fit-out, alongside the fit-out checklist and with cabling designed before the joiner builds the table. Retrofitting power and data into a completed boardroom table means either surface-mounted trunking or new joinery. Also make sure the wireless and switching under it is designed for a room full of people on video, and that the switch feeding it has the PoE budget and the comms room design to support it.
Room accounts: you need one in each suite, and they are configured differently
A room that appears in both organisations’ calendars needs an account in both.
In Microsoft 365, the room is an Exchange Online room mailbox with an associated resource account. That account must hold a Teams Rooms licence: Microsoft’s documentation is explicit that per-user enterprise Microsoft 365 licences are not authorised for shared meeting devices. Teams Rooms Basic is available at no additional cost but must still be added through the admin centre and assigned, is capped at 25 licences per organisation, and licenses one system per resource account. Teams Rooms Pro is unlimited in count and adds the Pro management portal, device analytics and health alerts, Conditional Access, dual-screen support, Front Row, large gallery, meeting chat, and the intelligent audio and video features including speaker identification, multi-camera panoramic room view, AI noise suppression and people counting.
The calendar processing settings matter more than most people realise, and two of them are directly relevant to cross-platform joining. Microsoft’s recommended configuration sets AutomateProcessing to AutoAccept, ProcessExternalMeetingMessages to $true so invitations from outside your organisation are processed at all, and DeleteComments to $false so the body of the invitation is preserved. That second one is the point: the room builds its join button by reading the meeting link out of the invitation body. Strip the body and the button never appears. You will also need to exclude *.meet.google.com/*, *.zoom.us/* and *.webex.com/* from Safe Links URL rewriting for the same reason, and allow the room direct outbound internet access, because Direct Guest Join connects directly rather than through your SIP path.
Two small traps: set the resource account password to never expire, and set the time zone, which defaults to Pacific rather than to Melbourne.
In Google Workspace, rooms are calendar resources created under buildings and features in the admin console, and the Meet hardware device is then associated with that calendar resource. Google’s documentation notes that only Google Calendar is fully compatible with Meet hardware scheduling, so a third-party calendar will not drive the on-device agenda. The Meet hardware licence is a separate, per-device, one-year term licence in addition to your Workspace subscription. Up to ten can be bought directly in the admin console and beyond that you buy through a reseller. Note the renewal behaviour: direct purchases through Google do not auto-renew, resellers do, and if the licence lapses the device goes through a grace period and is then automatically deprovisioned. That is a genuine operational risk in a business without a renewal calendar. The rest of the console settings worth knowing are in the Google Workspace admin console settings that matter and hardening Google Workspace.
The support burden of each approach, which is the real cost
Rank the four options by how much support they generate over three years, not by purchase price.
Bring-your-own-device rooms generate the fewest platform problems and the most cable problems. Nothing to licence, nothing to patch, nothing to renew. But there is no remote monitoring, so you find out a room is broken when someone walks out of a meeting to tell you, and the failure is almost always the cable or the dock rather than the bar.
A single-platform room system generates the least user friction and the most licence administration. One-touch join works, the room reports its health to a management portal, and the recurring work is licence renewals, firmware, and the resource account not drifting.
A dual-certified room system running one platform with interop for the other generates the most calls. This is the honest cost of the option everybody wants. The interop path has different limits from the native path, so the room behaves differently depending on who booked the meeting, and staff cannot predict which experience they are about to get. Expect to be explaining this repeatedly.
Two rooms, one per platform, generates the least technical support and the most booking confusion. People book the Teams room for a Meet call. Label the doors.
What we would actually specify
For a mixed-fleet business with two to four rooms, in order:
- Make the small rooms bring-your-own-device. One good USB bar, one display, one USB-C cable at the table. Platform-agnostic, cheap to run, and it will still be correct in five years regardless of what the two vendors do to their interop products.
- Make the main boardroom a proper room system on the platform that hosts the majority of your external meetings, with the correct room account and licence, and accept the documented limits when it joins the other platform. If Google Meet interop matters and you want it native, that argues for Teams Rooms on Windows rather than an Android bar, which is a decision made at purchase and is expensive to reverse.
- Create the room in both suites’ calendars regardless of which platform the hardware runs, so external invitations from either side land somewhere sensible.
- Check the published support end date on every device before you buy it, because the range across current models is very wide.
The trade-off in that recommendation is deliberate: you are accepting that one room is a compromise on one platform, in exchange for not paying twice for hardware, licences and support in every room. If your business genuinely runs an even split of external meetings across both platforms and the calls are commercially important, buy two rooms and stop trying to be clever.
The wider version of this problem, identity and device management across Microsoft, Google and Apple in one business, is covered in running Windows, Mac and Google in one business, and if you are still deciding which suite to standardise on we have compared Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. The room build itself sits alongside video conferencing setup and, if the rooms are being built as part of a relocation, moving office. If you are also consolidating telephony into the same platform, Teams Phone is the adjacent decision.
If you have a boardroom that works for one half of your business and embarrasses you in front of the other half, we will look at the room, the platform mix and the calendars together rather than just quoting hardware. Call TechAssist on 1300 028 324 or get in touch at https://techassist.au/contact/. Bring the room dimensions and we can tell you on the first call whether a single bar is going to cover it.