UC Workspace Quicklaunch is out of support: what breaks, and when

If your meeting rooms still run Quicklaunch, you are where I was: software that does its job well, with nobody left behind it.

The facts. Kramer Electronics acquired UC Workspace in February 2022. End of sales for Quicklaunch came in December 2023, end of support at the end of 2024. The support site is still up, frozen, with the notice at the top of every page. The licence store is empty. Kramer shipped no equivalent: Kramer Control is an AV control system, not a meeting launcher.

What makes this awkward is that Quicklaunch was good. Over thirty conferencing platforms recognised, one-touch join from the room calendar, kiosk mode, cleanup between meetings. Avocor was a Platinum OEM partner and shipped a build tuned for its displays, so plenty of organisations received Quicklaunch with their panels without ever going looking for it.

The deadline that will decide for you

Quicklaunch reads calendars through Exchange Web Services. Microsoft is retiring EWS from Exchange Online. From 1 October 2026, EWS requests from non-Microsoft applications are blocked. On 1 April 2027 the service is switched off permanently, with no exceptions and no way for an administrator to turn it back on. An allow-list of application IDs buys you until April 2027, but it has to be requested before the end of August 2026.

Not everything dies on that date. Quicklaunch has spoken Microsoft Graph since build 4.0.680.0. Rooms on a later build, configured for Graph, will pass the cutoff without noticing. Rooms still on V3, on an earlier V4, or on a recent V4 still configured for EWS will lose their calendar.

Careful with the shortcut: your version number does not decide this, your authentication mode does. A room on 4.1 or 4.2 can still be configured for EWS and fall over on 1 October, even though it has everything it needs to move to Graph.

The check takes ten minutes and three steps. In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, open the EWS usage report: it tells you which applications in your tenant still call EWS, and Quicklaunch will show up there if it is affected. Then record the exact version installed on each room. At 4.0.680.0 or above you can switch to Graph yourself. The EWS-to-Graph migration article is still online on the frozen support portal, and the change costs nothing. On V3 or below 4.0.680.0, no switch is possible and you need a replacement.

One word on the allow-list of application IDs, often presented as the fallback: it only defers to 1 April 2027, it has to be requested before the end of August 2026, and it assumes you know the ID of the application making the EWS calls. For an abandoned product whose vendor no longer answers, that is far from given.

The rooms I look after are on 4.2.787 and on Graph. They will not fall over on 1 October. It did not change my conclusion. Software that will never get another fix eventually gives way somewhere else: a Windows update, a Zoom or Teams client that changes its launch scheme, an expired certificate, a new security policy. This is not a scheduled outage, it is erosion.

What you are already losing without seeing it

A good part of Quicklaunch’s value was its platform list. That list emptied itself. Verizon shut BlueJeans down in 2024. Lifesize went bankrupt and was picked up by Enghouse. StarLeaf went into administration in 2023. Consumer Skype closed in May 2025, Skype for Business Online had already been retired in 2021, and the Server versions went out of support in October 2025. Google Hangouts is gone, Cisco Spark is now Webex.

What matters today is about ten entries: Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, GoTo, RingCentral, Amazon Chime, plus self-hosted platforms like Jitsi or BigBlueButton and whatever is specific to your organisation. That is good news. The replacement you are looking for does not need thirty integrations, it needs the right ones.

Your options, with the prices

These vendors list their prices in dollars. I have converted them at the ECB reference rate for 27 August 2026, 1 euro to 1.1645 dollars.

Do nothing. Defensible if your rooms are on Graph and you accept life without fixes. Keep an eye on the launch schemes of the Zoom, Teams and Webex clients: they change without warning, and nobody is patching your side any more.

Move to DisplayNote Launcher. Around 420 EUR per room per year at list, less through a reseller. Dell lists the three-year Basic licence at 1,265 EUR. Some panels, including Promethean ActivPanels, include the first year. You get a central management console, digital signage and active support. It is a proper product at a proper price.

Move to Conferfly. Less well known and the closest competitor of the lot: 172 EUR per room per year, or 17 EUR monthly, with a 21-day trial and no card. Eleven platforms recognised, including RingCentral, Dialpad, Lark, Vonage and Jitsi, plus a booking system, wireless screen sharing and tablet controller apps for Android and iPad. The difference in kind: Conferfly opens in a browser on the room PC and connects to your calendars through its own online service. For plenty of organisations that is exactly right, and the feature-to-price ratio is hard to beat. If you need a real Windows kiosk, forced native desktop clients, or you cannot hand your room calendars to a third party, it is a different product.

Switch to a certified room system. Microsoft Teams Rooms joins Zoom, Webex and Google Meet meetings directly, and the Basic licence is free for up to 25 devices per tenant. Watch the catch: every Teams Rooms licence, Basic included, requires certified hardware. A Windows PC or an OPS module behind a screen is not a certified device and does not qualify. So the free licence assumes you first buy the system. For scale: a Neat Bar runs 2,060 to 2,575 EUR, a Neat Board 50 is 5,145 EUR, a Neat Bar Pro with Neat Pad bundles at 5,025 EUR. This is the road many people take when they leave Quicklaunch, and it is a capital purchase rather than a subscription. For rooms that are already certified, Pexip sells One-Touch Join at 9 to 17 EUR per room per month.

Replace it with something lighter. That is the road I took. I wrote RoomStart for our rooms: room calendar read through Graph, one-touch join into the native desktop client rather than a browser, kiosk mode, session cleanup, Intune deployment. It covers a good part of what Quicklaunch did, without a central console or estate analytics. It has been running in production since late August 2026. Perpetual licence, 350 EUR ex VAT per display, first year included, maintenance optional afterwards.

If you are in the same position

RoomStart is not commercially available yet: the prices on its product page are indicative. I want to find out first how many organisations are actually stuck with the same problem, because that decides what gets built first.

If your rooms run Quicklaunch, write to me. What I want to know: how many rooms, which version, EWS or Graph, and which platforms your organisers actually use. I will answer with what I know about your deadline, and I will not sell you anything. If a lightweight replacement does take shape, you will hear about it before anyone else.

You will find me on the contact page.