Blog Post

Microsoft Teams Blog
2 MIN READ

Intelligent Communications takes the next step with calling in Teams

Paul Cannon's avatar
Paul Cannon
Former Employee
Dec 12, 2017

In September, we introduced a new vision for intelligent communications including plans to evolve Microsoft Teams into the primary client for calling and meetings in Office 365. As part of this, we are bringing comprehensive calling and meetings capabilities into Microsoft Teams, along with data and insights from the Microsoft Graph, and a strong roadmap of innovation to empower teams to achieve more.

  Easily view your calling historyToday we are releasing new calling capabilities in Teams, providing full featured dialing capabilities, complete with call history, hold/resume, speed dial, transfer, forwarding, caller ID masking, extension dialing, multi-call handling, simultaneous ringing, voicemail, and text telephone (TTY) support. You can expect this to roll out over the next few hours and should come soon to your tenant.


To add calling in Teams for your users, the first thing you need is Phone System (formerly Cloud PBX), which is included with Office 365 E5 and available as an add-on to other Office 365 plans. From there, you can subscribe to a Calling Plan (formerly known as PSTN Calling) for any number of users in your organization.


Together, a Calling Plan and Phone System in Office 365 create a phone system for your organization, giving each user a primary phone number and letting them make and receive phone calls to and from outside of your organization. This solution also allows your organization to shift away from expensive telephony hardware and simplifying by centralizing the management of your phone system.


With the addition of calling, Teams is an even more robust hub for teamwork -- the single place for your content, contacts and communications including chat, meetings and calling in a modern, collaboration experience.


Getting started with calling in Teams
To get started with calling in Teams, please review our quick start guide. You can learn more about geographic availability of Calling Plans here.  We also invite you to join us live December 18, at 9 AM PDT on Teams On Air to hear guest Marc Pottier, Principal Program Manager discuss and demo calling plans in Microsoft Teams in more detail.

 

Updated Jan 26, 2021
Version 3.0

70 Comments

  • This is great news! 

     

    Having said that, for customers that have on-prem SfB only, it looks like the lack of hybrid voice support in teams means they're forced to do a two-step migration: move all SfB users to SfB Online, then move them again to Teams. Is there a way around that limitation or should I just be telling people to wait for hybrid support?

  • shawn harry's avatar
    shawn harry
    Iron Contributor

    Thanks for the tip Dino! I was just about to do the same from the shell but this is much easier!

  • shawn harry's avatar
    shawn harry
    Iron Contributor

    In addition to Erwins point in my testing inward dialing from the PSTN to Teams doesnt ring my Teams client although my SfB clients ring no problem?

  • Aaron Buckley's avatar
    Aaron Buckley
    Copper Contributor

    Hi Teams Team! Will there be options for Teams to integrate with other phone systems from other vendors? My company is currently potentially looking into a Cisco phone system, but Microsoft Teams as our workspace chat client.

  • Great news!

     

    how are we going to choose between Skype or Teams for delivering pstn calls? 

  • Apologies Deleted and other first readers - all of our documentation systems move at different speeds and timing them is tough :-). The links should be live shortly.

  • Cian Allner's avatar
    Cian Allner
    Silver Contributor

    Fantastic update, really excited about this and how it's all coming together.  It would be great if we could get an update to the https://aka.ms/skype2teamsroadmap, so it's easy for customers to track progress, with whats been delivered as we go into the new year!

  • 404 Error on quick start guide FYI, awesome news though!