I am not sure when it happened, but as I go to renew the licensing within Microsoft 365, we have noticed that several of the teams phone system licenses have changed names and other are being depreciated. My company uses Synnex to process our licensing, and they published this nice nifty little guide.

Most of the licensing that I had ordered was Business Voice w/o calling plan. This was used for Teams Direct Routing. This is now being replaced with Teams Phone Standard license and apparently another license that is a 0 cost item to allow for Audio Conferencing.

Microsoft also changed the resource account licensing to an easier name as well. This is called Teams Resource Account as opposed to Virtual Teams user. This is also a 0 cost line item. You need this license for your autoattendants and Call queues.

I now have the excitement of changing about 1000 licenses from Business Voice to Teams Phone Standard. I am assuming nothing will break by swapping the license, but time will tell. Remember, it takes Teams up to 24 hours to acknowledge a change, and when people lose their licensing, they lose their phone number. I’m fairly sure that programming won’t get wiped away by changing licensing…but time will tell! No update means everything went just fine….I promise!

I was having a mental block on today’s blog post, so I thought I would ask Chat GPT what it thought on the Teams Phone System. I asked it what were the 5 main features that stand out over the competition. It provided the following:

1. Call Routing and Transfer: With the Teams Phone System, users can easily route incoming calls to specific individuals or departments within their organization. They can also transfer calls to other team members or external contacts, making it easy to manage call traffic and ensure that customers and partners are connected with the right people.
2. Voicemail: Teams Phone System includes a voicemail feature, which allows users to leave messages for others who are unavailable to take their calls. Users can receive voicemail messages as an email attachment, making it easy to keep track of missed calls and respond to important messages in a timely manner.
3. Call Analytics: Teams Phone System offers powerful analytics tools that allow administrators to track call volumes, monitor call quality, and gain insights into how their teams are using the system. This information can help organizations make data-driven decisions to optimize their communication processes and improve customer service.
4. Auto Attendant: The Auto Attendant feature of Teams Phone System allows organizations to create custom call menus and greetings to route incoming calls to the appropriate departments or individuals. This feature can help to improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that callers are directed to the right people and given the information they need quickly and efficiently.
5. Emergency Calling: Teams Phone System includes an emergency calling feature, which allows users to dial emergency services directly from their Teams client. The system automatically sends the caller’s location to emergency services, ensuring that help can be dispatched quickly and accurately.

Now, I am not very impressed with this list. Any VoIP system can do points 1, 4, and 5. I would even argue that other platforms do these features BETTER than teams. Voicemail within teams is very nice and is a good selling point. The voicemail gets transcribed instantly and you can view the transcription through teams or outlook. As far as advanced call analytics go, I know that Teams logs all that information, but I don’t find clients appetitite to mine that information all too much. So now, lets highlight my list.

1. Voicemail. We agree with the statements above.
2. Integration with other 365 platforms. Seemless integration with Outlook is darn right amazing.
3. Cost. In my experience, Teams Phone System tends to be cheaper if you already have a 365 subscription.
4. Remove the requirement of having physical phones. Granted, you can still have your physical phone, but Teams has moved away from the reliance of a physical handset
5. Mobility. The ability to seamlessly transfer a call from device to device depending on where I am is very powerful.

So, to drill this home, sometimes, the AI is a cool tool, but it is not always right 🙂

When you’re using Microsoft Teams Direct Routing as your primary calling solution, chances are that sometimes you also need to permanently forward calls to one of your numbers to another external phone number.

Forwarding by a Licensed Teams User

Setting up a forwarding of numbers can be achieved in multiple ways. The most obvious one to just create and license a Teams user and setup a permanent call forwarding for that user in the Teams Client.

The user needs a Business Basic + Teams Phone Standard License. You cannot use a Common Area Phone.

Since there is no voice app like an auto attendant or call queue involved in this scenario, all calls to the direct number of this particular user will be forwarded right away. This also means that the caller will hear the ring back tone, until the external participant (forwaring target) answers the call.

Advantages:

• Direct forwarding, call does not get picked up or intercepted by Teams
• Good for scenarios where the forwarding target often changes. This allows users to change the number without needing a Teams Administrator to make a change

Disadvantages:

• License costs
• Configuration can only be reviewed or changed by logging in to the user
• Can’t use Service or Toll-Free numbers

Forwarding by a Resource Account

It’s also possible to transfer calls to external PSTN numbers by using resource accounts assigned to auto attendants or call queues. Before you can assign a number to a resource account, you need to assign a free Teams Phone Standard — Virtual User License to the resource account.

Once the license is assigned, we need to assign a phone number to the resource account:

Set-CsPhoneNumberAssignment -Identity user@example.,com -PhoneNumber +1231231234 -PhoneNumberType DirectRouting

Next we also need to assign it a Voice Routing Policy:

Grant-CsOnlineVoiceRoutingPolicy -Identity user@email.com -PolicyName "FirstTrunk"

For my test, I setup a auto attendant without business hours so it will always perform the same action: forward the call to an external number. This works but the autoattendant picks up the call causing a pause in the phone call. This would not work if the forward was for a FAX number.

Since it’s also possible to forward calls from a call queue to an external number, we can leverage this to create a similar experience as to when the call is permanently forwarded by a Teams user.

A call queue has two options to control actions or forwardings. Overflow (max. number of simultaneous calls) or timeout.

If we set the timeout to zero (0 minutes, 0 seconds) the queue still answers the call, before it’s forwarded. Even if there is no greeting configured.

A good example to see that the queue picked up the call is that the counter starts on any phone. Here I’m using Skype to call the call queue and you can see that the call has been established for 5 seconds, even though the configured forwarding target has not answered the call yet. While the call rings the forwarding target, Teams will generate a ring back tone inside the already established call.

If we set the overflow threshold of the queue to zero on the other hand, TAC shows a warning message that the queue won’t play the greeting when the overflow threshold is set to 0.

Advantages:

• No License costs
• Can use Service or Toll-Free numbers
• FAX calls will work if using a call queue

Disadvantages:

• Only Teams admins can change the forwarding target

Summary

Even though it might not be an obvious solution, using a call queue to permanently forward calls is still a great way to have more control over all your DIDs right inside Teams itself without adding any license costs.

I have a client that currently uses a Valcom VIP-801A Paging Gateway which at initial glance does not have a direct integration with Teams PBX. I have explored the Walkie Talkie feature, but that does not integrate with the existing pager. You could do something fancy with an iPad and a bluetooth overhead pager but this paging unit feels like it is older than I am. It is an analog overhead pager unit and I still have nightmares when I set it up back in 2017. This leaves me with the following options:

1. Replace it with some sort of bluetooth paging unit that can integrate with a tablet. This would support Walkie Talkie integration within teams and we are done
2. Leave it alone and leave physical phones that is hooked up to the old integration that is now dedicated to paging.
3. Buy CCX phones that integrate within teams but in order to use the paging unit, you have to switch profiles from teams to “paging” profile. The paging profile is just a SIP profile.
4. Throw out the overhead pager. They are dumb 🙂

Option 3 is dumb. No one is going to take the time to log off the phone, reboot it, then perform a page then reboot the phone again. I am confused that this is even an option with these phones. The purpose of the paging unit is that it is quick and simple. Nothing is quick and simple with option 3.

Option 2 makes the most sense. There is little overhead with leaving the existing system in place and most users would use either their cell phone or computer for teams. Most users tend to not use the physical phones if that is an option. The downside of this is that there are phones on people’s desks that they cannot use to make phone calls. These phones would be dedicated to making overhead pages.

Option 1 is not likely. These overhead paging units are built into the ceiling and very difficult to get to. They also do not have physical power typically so a bluetooth paging unit would need to have electrical done in order to install it. I find that most companies that have an overhead paging unit tend to not have the investment capital to modernize their overhead paging unit especially when the existing one “works.” Works is a bit of a stretch since it doesn’t actually work with modern equipment. This is like saying why would I get rid of my tape player when it plays music just fine. I don’t need to steam music and play any song I can think of with a few clicks of the mouse or a quick voice command. Tape players just work!

My client is choosing option 4 since they are less in the office and more remote. They found that the paging unit stopped functioning well for their pandemic changed business requirements. If you have come across another option on how to integrate with teams, I would love to know. I do work with these dinosaurs about once a year or so, so while I have exposure to them, it is not as much as other telecommunication technologies.