Skype for Business Certified IP Phones with Microsoft Teams

John Joseph we support call queues with 3PIP phones and Teams right KruthikaPonnusamy ?

The lack of call queue support on 3PIP phones is a big issue. We have several clients that went with SfBO and invested in 3PIP phones within the last two years and are now being told they need to rip and replace (less than two years after making a large investment in Microsoft's solution). They all use call queues extensively and need to answer inbound calls using physical phones (this includes health care providers, police departments, etc., where soft clients are not a viable option). Please, Microsoft, rethink your stance on this issue.

Rob Geach I understand your frustrations. We have dozens of customers that are coming from the Lync\Skype for Business world and moving into Microsoft Teams, we provide guidance, roadmaps and the like specific to their requirements, taking into account existing devices they might have not just across their user base but in meeting spaces as well. The article I wrote that explains where we came from and where we are going was written to address precisely the misconceived notions you've stated above. I would also say the points you raised after reading my post make little to no sense: This article wasn't written from the perspective of Microsoft, nor was it written from the perspective of a Microsoft partner (which my company is) that is being "squeezed" (your words, not mine) into relaying their message. The article was written by me: an industry UC professional that has the knowledge and experience to provide a balanced perspective on this topic. You've chosen to introduce your own bias when reading it.

You also seem to assume that Microsoft is the one selling the phones here. They're not. I would be very surprised if Microsoft cares one way or the other what specific end user device you use, as long as it's supported, and that the user experience is consistent.

Nothing was "done because they [Microsoft] just really don't care". I'm totally over hearing this narrative. A new platform was released: Microsoft Teams. It's taken off, one reason being because it left all the baggage of LCS\OCS\Lync\SfB behind and built fresh on a new hyper-scale platform that made sense in this cloud first modern world. It's built on an entirely new protocol, and no, you can't just get a SIP device and "make it work". To your original point, Teams works on a Yealink C960 because the device already happened to run Android, which aligned with Microsoft's strategy for Teams devices.

Is there some pain moving from one to the other? Yes. I know, because I work with dozens of organisations that need assistance to get there. You can keep complaining, making broad assumptions that this is some kind of corporate money grab, or you can get on with it and move forward.

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. 

Damien MargaritisI don't work for Microsoft so their motives are irrelevant to me personally, but in general companies have a fiduciary responsibility to up-sell and one of the ways they up-sell is by obfuscating their reasoning with unnecessary technical pleas.  For example, anywhere you see justifications about approaches taken, they're not talking about literal technical limitations like a "limited by the technology of my time" howard stark meme.  They're talking about selling you on the most expedient way they could accomplish their specific goals while costing them the least amount of money to generate the solution.  in the case of your blog, let's just hit the bullet points to find all the sales pitches that are happening.

"control end user experience" different is just different, not better or worse. Microsoft was actually reverse selling this feature not more than 2-3 years ago by claiming that each vendor was able to apply more aggregate resources and work in a competitive landscape to pull off 3pip interfaces that MS never would have been able to achieve by continuing the LPE program in-house.  So you can see this bullet point is 100% arbitrary depending on whatever story Microsoft is telling at the time.

"lack of feature parity" again this was being heralded as a positive in that it provided customers who needed more features to choose more expensive vendor solutions and customers who needed cheap phones the ability to give up some features. so basically how great flexibility and choice was in the crucible of the free market.

"Inconsistent delivery of new features" you had to push out new firmware whether it was tanjay/aries or 3pip so obviously you're not talking about that, but the functionality being pushed around in o365 tenants is anything but consistent so I know you're not taking that angle.  as for your naked assertion that it's maybe sorta not technically possible to code new features into existing firmware that has already been established as FUD or at bare minimum an additional development branch that Microsoft simply doesn't want to manage as "it doesn't fit with their approach" aka it will either be too much hassle or cost too much.

"there's no SIP in teams" so what? you wrote two paragraphs that boil down to "you have to use a different protocol to register."  so is the subtext here that developers are incapable of adding teams registration to a 3pip firmware?  because I'd absolutely love to hear a polycom or yealink dev admit that in a public forum.  Or are you saying the sip gateway to cloud voice is already in maintenance mode and microsoft doesn't want to develop against it anymore? because that goes right back to hassle/money again.

Now just to bring it all home, I'm 100% sure that Microsoft thinks they are making the best decisions for managing Teams as a live service over the next 10 years, but they've also over-promised and under-delivered in regard to voice services and supportability matrices in that area, and not just with their constantly changing definitions of "certified/optimized for Skype fully supported I mean mostly supported ok fine here's a subset of features that will work" and "LPE supported for Teams woops not supported afterall" and "TLS 1.0 actively blocked woopsie we just meant not supported" and their own personal mission accomplished variation "now has feature parity with SFBO". 

In a vacuum while reading about it in news articles and blogs it's all well and good but when you've got your MS rep squeezing you on how much better Teams phones are less than 2 years after replacing all LPE phones with 3PIP phones and then you have fasttrack consultants trying to change your plans just because Microsoft added a Skype CU one month ago that provided a new migration path and then you can't even get your PoC on how to handle 3pip phones interop with call queues definitively answered because now Microsoft doesn't want you to migrate SFB Server to SFBO before upgrading to teams because they want to deprecate SFBO... ok well that's all really annoying, but they haven't provided any guidance on migrating RGS agents to Teams call queues much less whether or not those agents will need new hardware or not.

So then you come to the realization that this is all done because they just really don't care that they were selling 2 year lifecycle phones and/or there is some program manager somewhere who has said in a private meeting, "they'll just have to suck it up and buy new phones if they want xyz" while completely ignoring the number of hoops that customers had to jump through just to get their 3pip phones purchased. And then you come across some post that talks about how this situation "isn't ideal" and that this consolidation in direct opposition to what they were selling not very long ago "will open up many more capabilities" while failing to name a single capability other than that it will make the Microsoft devs' lives easier.  Then yes, at that point I will go out of my way to say that at a very fundamental level these are all arbitrary excuses that sit on a throne of lies.  and at that same level, the reason you're getting limited backwards compatibility is due to both money and hassle or some variation thereof so as far as I'm concerned coming from the perspective of a Microsoft customer I'm completely justified in my irritation regardless of their reasoning for doing what they've done.  It's the ends that are the problem here, not the means.

Rob Geach It's got nothing to do with up-sell or lack of motivation to develop. The approach Microsoft is taking with Teams phones is to have devices from vendors run Android OS, with the (Microsoft developed) Teams app running on top. This is to ensure there's feature parity across all devices regardless of vendor: Microsoft is in control of the code base. 

If you want to know why Microsoft has taken this approach: https://dmunified.com/2018/11/15/devices-for-microsoft-teams/

"This is a fundamental change that means the older tech (Skype Certified phones) won't work on Teams."

that CP960 though.

obviously these devices aren't hardware limited like they're running some hypothetical ASIC that only speaks SIP.  There certainly could be a fundamental change preventing companies from developing teams firmware for existing skype phones but it's not a technical one. it's a money one. 

in the yealink world at least the T4 series has full Opus codec support, but they want to upsell T5 series instead so they just don't develop a Teams firmware for T4 and then some sucker comes along and throws in "certainly a downside of fast evolving technology" as if he's not literally wrong and there should be some gestalt world-wide knowledge that companies are allowed to hand-wave away any criticism with "agile devops synergy oh well hey look new shiny" instead of fixing their broken business plans.

David Stradleysometimes you need to make a big leap in tech that means the old tech becomes redundant. Teams devices use REST whereas SfB devices use SIP. This is a fundamental change that means the older tech (Skype Certified phones) won't work on Teams. Whilst this isn't ideal, it opens up so many more capabilities in the future. Microsoft and device vendors are working hard to provide interop capabilities between Skype and Teams but there will always be edge cases that aren't catered for. It's certainly a downside of fast evolving technology.

Not that it will likely matter, but it’s just plain wrong that certified SfB phones will not support the full Teams feature set, particularly since SfB is being phased out after a relatively short lifecycle. Today, I discovered that you cannot admit an external participant to a Teams call from a SfB Polycom phone. Our organization uses conference calls primarily to communicate with external parties. Now, all Dial-in meetings will have to be hosted from a Teams client, not a phone. Technology should build on existing functionality and make work easier, not harder. Come on, Microsoft.

dmunified When users upgrade to Teams, Call Queues will work via the native Teams IP phones. We do not support it today on Skype for Business IP phones.