Skype for Business Certified IP Phones with Microsoft Teams

Rob Geach I am the "program manager somewhere" who two years ago proposed a new generation of Teams Phones, which actually run our Teams app, UX, and media stack.  I did this after 6 years of running the team at Microsoft which worked with our partners on 3PIP phones and other devices.

With that context, I will say that Damien Margaritis is absolutely correct in his statements. 3PIP phones and other protocol interop devices (where the partner used their own media stack and UX) worked fine in an on-prem server world, but simply did not work well in a cloud service world. There was no reasonable way to expect our partners to keep up with us in new FW releases. Every FW release would be outdated, and have a ton of known issues, the day it came out.  Our customers were complaining about inconsistent feature support across 3PIP phones, and about lack of overall reliability.

Could we have figured out some way for partner devs to do something on Linux based, older, under powered phones to register to Teams?  Maybe, but it would have ended up looking exactly the same as what we ended up doing with 3PIP phones, which is supporting them with "basic functionality" via a SIP gateway we built.  That's the reality of us having built a new, born in the cloud, communications service for Teams, which is aimed at delivering a higher level of quality and reliability, and does not have SIP support. 

As far as LPE phones, we had communicated the impending end of life for those a long long time ago. Those phones are based on a 10 yr old version of Windows Embedded CE (and I also used to be in the Windows Embedded business at that time btw so have some insight on that), and as you said they do not support TLS 1.2 as the OS level, so are inherently not secure.  For us to have "updated" these, we would have needed to choose a modern "small OS", and a modern client, and that's exactly what we did with Teams Phones, which are Android based and run a Teams Android client.  Unfortunately the HW for LPE phones was so old and under-powered that there was no way for us to do a FW upgrade to make them Teams phones (btw we actually invested in re-writing the old LPE client twice to get around the brutal memory limitations on those devices).

I'm sorry you feel there's some "throne of lies" here somewhere, but really there's not. We are doing our best to work through all of the limitations of older technologies and HW, while at the same time trying to meet customer asks for a higher bar of phone user experience and reliability with Teams. 

I can sense your frustration on this topic, so would also say that I would be happy to listen and/or discuss this further on a direct call / Teams meeting with you, so please feel free to pm me if you're interested.