Highlights from Enterprise Connect 2022 – new Microsoft Teams announcements for hybrid work

Very exciting news... That will become a game changer that CAP now would support enpoint manager and the DECT phone integration.

However, 3 huge parts are missing in my mind:

- CAP should allow (again) to at least run the Meeting sign-in experience on TeamsIPPhonePolicy

- Analog device/analog device user handling is completely lacking within Teams. This option was there in Skype for Business, and as long as Microsoft does not provide a good handling of them, there is NO feature parity between SfB and Teams

- At a bare minimum, it should be possible to create/read AD (AAD) contacts and be searchable from the Teams clients. With that, you at least could search for analog devices/their 'associated' AD/AAD object. 

- (regardless of analog devices - that would also help in other cases like building a phonebook for external contacts and those to be searchable company-wide... The contacts are already there by e.g. get-AzureADContact or get-mailcontact, Teams client is just unable to read/display them.) This was possible in SfB.

-A better option would be to be able to create "analog device user accounts" (maybe similar to the Resource accounts used by AA/CQ), to have the routing and number assignment fully covered within the Teams backend).

- see above for the Contact handling

Edit:

one of my biggest pleas must have been heard:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=93050

at least a good start 🙂

Microsoft_Teams_team  - instead of a "mail contact" (in Exchange terms: "get-mailcontact"), please rather consider a "get-azureadcontact". There should be no reason at all why a contact should be "mail-enabled" just for the sake of finding a phone number for that contact and calling that number.

Edit 2:

Seems i was too euphoric and i fell hard on that one... 😞

After opening a Ticket with MS and long discussions, I was explained that:

- Exchange Contacts are not Exchange Contacts, rather than "Contacts stored in any mailbox". (which was working before and i have no idea what that new enhancement would have been here)

- What the public understands as "Exchange Contacts" (get-mailcontact in EXC/EXO PS) are considered within Microsoft "Azure AD Contacts", which are not even considered to be part of anything Teams related. If you draw a line, the basic outcome of my ticket was "Maybe somewhen it will be coming". I have opened a design change request with MS - with no response so far.

5 years into Teams and such a basic (and in my mind easy to implement) feature (that was there in the OCS/Lync/SfB days) is completely missing.

...very frustrated camper here 😞