Retiring Unified Messaging in Exchange Online

The_Exchange_Team 

For customers who have not opted in to the transition to Cloud Voice Mail, exactly when can we expect the cutover of Auto-Attendants?  When will Exchange UM Auto-Attendants stop working?  What about Voice Mail? Currently, the "Set Up Voice Mail" option in Skype for Business clients directs to OWA.  After the switch, will it route to aka.ms/vmsettings?

Feedback:

• We have many informational Auto-Attendants that are updated daily by users in the field who do not have internet access.  As Cloud Voice Mail/Teams auto-attendants lack the ability to update greetings from a phone, they will no longer be able to update these greetings.

• As Teams lacks granular administrative roles, we must grant Auto-Attendant managers the Teams Telecommunications Admin role.  This not only grants them access to ALL Auto-Attendants, but gives them access to many other Voice-related controls that they should not have access to.  We have already experienced several major voice outages due to accidental deletions/misconfigurations.

These are huge pain points for our organization.  We are a large customer with many blue-collar employees in industrial environments and in the field.  While we embrace the benefits of a connected workforce where possible, we have many employees who are traditional voice users who only have a deskphone.  These changes are restricting them from doing their jobs and forcing us to reevaluate our voice platform.