In mid-November we plan to release Cloud Connector Edition, version 2.1. Our primary goal for this release focused on improving the ability to cloud manage CCE via the Microsoft Operations Management Suite.
Tenant administrators care about monitoring the state of several indicators when managing CCE:
- Key services to insure the solution is green and available
- Hardware utilization for the virtual machines
- Key statistics such in-bound and out bound calls to allow for fine tuning of resources
And since we are supporting the Operations Management Suite, a template will be available to ease configuration.
With our announcements at Ignite, customers have asked many questions about our future for both CCE as well as the future for voice and Teams.
First, it is important to know we have recently released a Skype to Teams roadmap to help everyone understand our plans for the Skype for Business Online transition to Microsoft Teams. We recommend that any Office 365 customer considering the voice workload should be reviewing this document.
We will continue to support CCE for Skype for Business Online hybrid voice users and will provide a fully supported transition path to Teams. As part of Office 365 communication services, we plan to enable a simpler hybrid PSTN connection model for calling in Microsoft Teams. To help accelerate delivering this new connection model, we have decided to not add support for CCE coexistence with on-premises Skype for Business. We understand this decision does impact customer planning, but we believe this is the right approach for the long-term vision we have for voice and calling features in Microsoft Teams.
For customers that were considering using CCE coexistence, Microsoft recommends considering alternate approaches to enable existing on-premises Skype for Business for Hybrid PSTN and begin migrating users to Office365:
- Split Domain Hybrid PSTN. also referred to as OPCH (On-Premises Configuration Hybrid) which includes modifying your current Skype for Business 2015 deployment configuration to support on-premises homed users and online homed users.
- 3rd Party Solution. For those customers who want to avoid modifying their main deployment, they can acquire an OPCH specific appliance from our one of our partners.
We will be providing more information on the new Hybrid PSTN deployment model for Teams and the opportunity to sign up to try it out in a Technical Preview in early 2018.